Vito Antonio Leo

Leo was born in San Vito degli Schiavoni (current San Vito dei Normanni, province of Brindisi), then part of the Kingdom of Naples.
He became a student at the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini at Naples in 1703, and was a pupil first of Francesco Provenzale and later of Nicola Fago. It has been supposed that he was a pupil of Pitoni and Alessandro Scarlatti, but he could not possibly have studied with either of these composers, although he was undoubtedly influenced by their compositions. His earliest known work was a sacred drama, L'infedelta abbattuta, performed by his fellow-students in 1712.

WORLD PREMIERE in modern times of an unknown comic opera which was recently rediscovered along with other three other Leo operas at the Abbey of Montecassino. L Alidoro (Golden Wings) is a lost-and-found story which explores the themes of love and jealousy from different perspectives in particular age and social status interweaving comedy with more serious reflections. Director Arturo Cirillo explains how in this opera, nothing is happening except a subtle and gorgeous relational game among the seven protagonists.

Everything is done with affection and great character as well as technical finesse. Such music demands innate timing, and these musicians, under Antonio Florio's direction, have it.

Conductor Jean-Claude Malgoire must be kicking himself pretty hard right now. Several years ago, impatient that no trace of Antonio Vivaldi's only opera set in the New World, Motezuma, seemed to be turning up, Malgoire cobbled his own version of the work by pulling together a variety of music from other bits and scraps of Vivaldi and fitting it to the extant libretto. Lo and behold, with the rediscovery of the Berliner Singakademie collection in Russia early in this century, the manuscript of Motezuma is now a known quantity, and it turns out that Malgoire's concoction bears no resemblance whatsoever to it. Nonetheless, even he has to be grateful that this extraordinary score has been located, and now, recorded by Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco on the Archiv Produktion release Vivaldi: Motezuma.

The Montecassino Monastery recently hosted the score of this comic opera by Leonardo Leo, one of the leading Neapolitan composers of the 18th century, who introduced new stylistic elements to the genre. Cirillo shows in a very exciting way in his direction how nothing actually happens in this opera - apart from a very subtle play of the relationships between the seven protagonists. As with Marivaux, this is about the social differences when the middle class turns to the servants and vice versa, and as in a Feydeauschen comedy, they wander on stage (and leave again) to spy, to portray themselves, or to court someone until everyone is eaten away by doubt.

The world has not yet fully discovered the riches of the impressive music libraries and archives of Portugal. They testify to the often complex trajectories followed all over Europe by a repertoire of splendid pieces, many of them showing the extent to which the Italian style had taken root in eighteenth-century Portugal. The superb mass by Pergolesi recorded here is a highly characteristic example. But the ensemble Turicum wanted to go even further in their exploration of this repertoire, accompanying the mass with performances of works by composers now totally (and unjustly) unknown, such as Antonio Gallassi and David Perez, not to mention Leonardo leo, acknowledged in his own time as a supreme master of sacred music.