Il Tirreno 12.02.2014

Franz Hauk and the Simon Mayr Chorus and Ensemble have spearheaded the revival of the music of Johann Simon Mayr who was born in Bavaria but lived in Italy. In the latest instalment of their critically acclaimed recordings they turn to Il sogno di Partenope, an allegorical staged cantata composed to mark the rebuilding of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples following a fire in February 1816. Mayr’s significance as an intermediary between the opera seria of the late eighteenth-century and the melodrama of the early-nineteenth is reflected in this important work, a unique kind of ‘cantata opera’ of which only the second act survives.

Argentine countertenor Franco Fagioli has emerged as one of the rising figures in that hot field, seemingly with the Italian opera of the first half of the 18th century as a specialty. As such, he might be particularly well represented by this collection of arias by Nicola Porpora, whose activities cut across a cross section of important activities in the century's second quarter. He was the teacher of both Haydn and Farinelli. He snagged many of Pietro Metastasio's high-tragedy opera seria libretti for himself and set them with suitably florid music, but he also had a considerable for sheer melody that's on display in this well-chosen program. Fagioli is not an exceptionally powerful countertenor, but he's capable of sheer smoothness of line that's appropriate to Porpora, who was called the greatest teacher of singers among composers, and the greatest composer among teachers of singing.