Barbara Ease

This recording has plenty to recommend it, despite the star power of its competition. The Aradia Ensemble–17 string players, 11 wind and brass players and four continuo players–are a lively, more-than-proficient group of period instrumentalists who, under Kevin Mallon, play the heck out of Handel's colorful, ever-changing score, and can be compared with the finest ensembles around. The obbligato oboist, harpsichordist, and sopranino recorder virtuoso (in Almirena's gorgeous first act "bird" aria) are superb. Mallon doesn't go for fierce string attacks, but every bit of his leadership has spring and energy. He and his cast are particularly careful with the recitatives, which are dramatically put forth. The cast is uniformly good.

"There’s the simple fact that the band members were old enough and experienced enough by now to be virtuosos on their instruments (what other group—rock or jazz or any other kind of music—could boast a trio of spectacularly singular talents such as Garcia, Lesh, and Weir?) but were still young enough to want to play and play and play some more, the happy, itchy inclination of youth. As a few of the shows in the Here Comes Sunshine boxed set attest, it wasn’t unusual for a 1973 concert to exceed four hours. And within the shows themselves, there are nearly nightly examples of hour-long orgies of tune-linked songcraft and juicy jamming.

Antonio Mazzoni was a fairly prolific Italian composer in the middle and late 18th century (1717–1785), and he Read more Antigono for the opening season of one of the world’s shortest-lived opera houses: the Ópera do Tejo in Lisbon. It opened on March 31, 1755, and was destroyed seven months later by an earthquake. (Its site is now a navy dockyard.) The libretto is by the famed Metastasio, and Mazzoni was clearly considered an important figure in his time. Metastasio wrote the librettos of the only three serious operas performed in the seven months of life for the opera house in Lisbon, and the choice of Mazzoni to write the music for one of them demonstrates his reputation at the time. He wrote perhaps 19 operas (we aren’t sure), many of which have not survived. Antigono is performed here in a critical edition edited by Nicholas McNayr.