de Liso

Il Prigionier Superbo is a three-act opera seria with six characters — two kings, two princes, two princesses. La Serva Padrona is a two-part comic intermezzo with two singing characters — master and servant. It was performed between Prigionier's acts when they bowed in 1733, as Naples theaters reopened after earthquake-forced closure. Prigionier vanished from the stage, but Serva Padrona grew popular, helped establish opera buffaand helped start a pamphlet war between Italian and French opera supporters in Paris… MARK MANDEL

As with the majority of Handel’s stage works, Rodelinda is composed in a purely Italian style. The libretto was adapted by Nicola Haym from a previous version by Antonio Salvi. In line with the norms for Italian opera, it consists of solo da capo arias interspersed with secco recitatives and, occasionally, with accompanied ones. The undoubted protagonist of the opera is Rodelinda, for whom the composer wrote eight of the original score’s thirty-two numbers, as well as the duet with Bertarido. Rodelinda’s characterisation is a masterpiece of psychological and musical insight, beginning with the entrance aria, Ho perduto il caro sposo.

Most opera fans are familiar with Gluck the reformist – the composer of Orphée et Eurydice who sought to balance drama and music in his works. But few know his early works which show him to be a master of the Baroque opera seria tradition he later rejected. L'innocenza giustificata, a festa teatrale written in 1755, is one of these works. Its structure – cobbled together from aria texts by Pietro Metastasio, but with new recitatives by Giacomo Durazzo – already shows a desire to create more dramatic continuity and interest than was commonly found in the Baroque period.

Didone is an opera, set to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello (later librettist for Claudio Monteverdi). The opera was first performed at Venice's Teatro San Cassiano during 1641. The plot is based on Virgil's Aeneid (Book 4 in particular), though Busenello, in his second libretto for Cavalli, replaces Dido's tragic suicide of Virgil with a happy ending in which Dido marries Iarbas, King of the Getuli, who saves Dido from herself after Aeneas abandons her. The action is divided into a prologue and 3 acts.

Fabio Biondi returns with the first recording of 'Carlo, Re d'Alemagna' by Alessandro Scarlatti, first performed in Naples in January 1716. The opera was resurrected in 2003 by Biondi (the leader of the innovative ensemble Europa Galante) who led a concert performance with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. This studio recording was made in late 2009. It is in many ways a typical example of Neapolitan Baroque opera with action assigned to the recitatives whilst the characters are developed during the arias. The opera deals with the accession to power and its exercise: an ever present problem in many ways and about the legitimacy of Carlo, successor to the late king. A mixture of opera seria and opera buffo, a requirement for the contemporary Neapolitan public c1690, is also found here.

Preceded by a solemn prologue in which Iride admonishes mortals that they should not offend the gods, the story of Cavalli’s Didone comes to life thanks to numerous solo passages of highly varied character and structure, designed both for simple basso continuo support and for a more complex instrumental accompaniment, for five real parts which enjoy some independent moments and which create a diversion from the action or blend in with it in a wholly logical way, intensifying it in a studied, evocative manner.

Nicola Porpora’s Op 1 set of Italian chamber cantatas receive a new and striking reading directed by Stefano Aresi, a leading interpreter of the Late Baroque composer. Neapolitan-born Porpora brought his nuove musiche with him in the early 1730s when he had set out for London (with his pupil Farinelli) to take advantage of the perceived wavering of Handel’s operatic fame there. Porpora, espying an opportunity there just as Handel himself had done before, quickly ingratiated himself with the nobility in Britain and his 12 cantatas, though probably written in Naples, were published under the patronage of Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales of Great Britain.

Thanks to this tenth recording by Accademia Bizantina in the central core of the Vivaldi Edition, Il Tamerlano can now take its justly earned place in the Vivaldi catalogue, helping to renew the name and reputation of Timur, the Tartar emperor whose memory was later overshadowed by the Ottoman sultan. Vivaldi's opera was first performed during the Venice Carnival of 1735, and resurrected in 2005 under the title Bajazet. Here, under the musical direction of Ottavio Dantone, we have a sextet of dramatically engaged virtuoso soloists, and an orchestra that is perfectly aware of Vivaldi's musical dialectic. All the soloists are superbly well equipped to deal with the Red Priest's acrobatic and inventive writing here seen in the context of several of his contemporaries.

This recording of La Daunia Felice ideally concludes a project of study and research that began in 1997 with the Study Seminar organised on the occasion of the bicentenary of the wedding of the heirs to the throne of Naples. In 2002 the Umberto Giordano Conservatory and the Foggia City Authorities promoted the first modern-day scenic performance in the restored Teatro Giordano. Paisiello’s La Daunia Felice was staged in Foggia on 25th June 1797 for the wedding of Prince Francesco, heir apparent to the throne of Naples, to the Archduchess Maria Clementina of Austria.

After a long war, Turkish emperor Soliman and Persian sophi Tamasse decide to seal the peace between their two countries and, to this end, exchange hostages. The preliminary treaty stipulates that, in order to make this alliance solid, Tamasse will wed Zanaida, Soliman s daughter. Meanwhile, the sophi falls in love with Osira, a Persian hostage sent by the emperor. This is where the action of this opera begins, the plot skillfully mixing Tamasse s infidelity, Zanaida s magnanimity, and Osira s ambition. It is a particularly appealing opera by the fourth and last of Johann Sebastian s sons, whose life was atypical for a Bach, for he carried out his career not in Germany but in Italy and England.