Comim, Flavio

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi owes much of his fame to La Serva Padrona, a comic intermezzo designed to be performed between the acts of an opera seria. In it, a maid and a servant conspire to convince their master to marry the maid. When Aldo Tarabella was asked to direct a performance of Pergolesi’s intermezzo, he wanted to do more than simply pair it with one of the operas it traditionally sits alongside – so he composed Il Servo Padrone, a companion piece, and a kind of sequel, to Pergolesi’s original.

Flavio was one of the operas Handel wrote for the Royal Academy of Music’s company at the King’s Theatre on the Haymarket. It has a character all of its own, very different from that of “Giulio Cesare” which followed it in 1724. Although the plot similarly concerns power and sex, these subjects are treated in a wholly different manner. Some commentators have seen it as almost a comedy. Certainly there are moments that might bring a smile to the face of the audience. These include two successive revenge arias for outraged fathers at the start of the second Act. Also one of the main plot devices relates to who is to have the difficult job of Governor of Britain. There is little else that might be seen as comic to anyone other than many modern opera producers…

John Sheppard

The real prize in this jam packed nine-CD set is of course the incandescent recording of Giulio Cesare with some of the most phenomenal singing on record by Larmore, Schlick, and Fink. When this came out it created quite a stir, given it is about as complete as it ever has been, and filled with Jacob’s searching and trend-setting conducting. While it won’t displace favorites of yesteryear, those recordings are of a different era and style altogether, and here the opera comes together in a manner fully redolent of what Handel must have envisioned.

Flavio comes from a fertile period in Handel's output, but despite the presence of Cuzzoni and Senesino, two of the most important and lauded singers of the day, it flopped when first presented in 1723. This is probably due to the fact that it's a comedy that turns tragic before ending happily–and London audiences simply couldn't get their heads around such a thing. Whatever the case, it contains aria after aria, with a duet thrown in–and each one is short, to the point, and always entertaining. The instrumental textures are never complex–and the rhythms, mostly upbeat, keep the opera moving at an almost sitcom pace. I won't go into the plot because it's not that hard to follow, but rest assured that this performance is dynamite.

Early music specialists are still working through the wealth of Handel operas that began coming more to light in the late 20th century. Flavio, Rè di Longobardi remains one of his more obscure works. Its musical variety and richness make it a piece that deserves more attention and this excellent recording in Chandos' series of Baroque operas featuring Christian Curnyn and Early Opera Company makes a strong case for it. The plot, like that of many of Handel's operas, is convoluted to the point of being indecipherable, but each of the characters is carefully drawn. These singers invest each one with an incisive dramatic distinctiveness, and their voices are different enough that here is never in doubt as to which characters are singing. Curnyn leads a superb cast in an elegant performance.