Europa Lehrmittel Schnittkonstruktion

Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768) is today best known as an eccentric violin virtuoso and composer of instrumental music, but he has also successfully operated as an opera composer during his time in London. His first opera Adriano in Siria was created in 1735 for the London Opera of Nobility, the rival company to Handel's opera troupe. The company had only a few years earlier (including the soprano castrato Senesino and Francesca Cuzzoni) poached all singing stars from Handel. Even worse: since 1734, it could also score with the castrato legend Farinelli. Veracini's Adriano in Siria is, in every respect, a spectacular and fascinating opera. The recording of Fabio Biondi and an appropriate illustrious singers ensemble is based on a highly successful concert performance series of the work at the Vienna Konzerthaus in 2013, which made alive again the spectacular opera event of 1735.

This is the world-premiere recording of L’Oracolo in Messenia, an opera prepared by Vivaldi for Vienna and now reconstructed by Fabio Biondi. He leads this triumphant performance, which opened the 2011 Resonanzen festival in the Austrian capital with a high-powered cast including Ann Hallenberg, Vivica Genaux and rising soprano Julia Lezhneva.

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.

This production of Anna Bolena faithfully meets the musical vision proposed by Fabio Biondi. The mise-en-scène, therefore, excludes any explicit reference to the plot’s historical time, and the events have been set at the beginning of the 1800s, when Donizetti’s opera was premièred.

La Santissima Annunziata est un oratorio d'Alessandro Scarlatti, écrit pour solistes (SSSAT) cordes et basse continue, créé à Rome au Palazzo della Cancelleria en 1700 ou 1703, sur un livret italien de Pietro Ottoboni.
Présenté pour la première fois le 3 avril 1700 au Palazzo della Cancelleria de Rome (résidence du cardinal) et repris postérieurement, au moins dans autres deux occasions : le 1er avril 1703 et le 25 mars 1708 (palazzo Ruspoli). Le fait qu'une annonce de la représentation de 1700 attribue la responsabilité de la musique à Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier, musicien attaché à Ottoboni, a fait douter sur le véritable auteur de celle-ci.

Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos, yet even this tiny sample of six, written during the composer’s visit to Prague between 1730 and 1731, demonstrates in every movement his genius of harmonic and dramatic surprise. Each concerto is startlingly original, from the opening movement of the E Minor RV 278 that pits daring solo passages against a hypnotic, pulsing orchestra, while the same concerto’s Largo even feels modern in its angularity. A more familiar Vivaldi can be heard in the C Major RV 186, with its Italianate innocence and winsome middle Largo. But whatever the composer’s mood, Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante thrill to his ingenuity at every step.

No Handel opera is as enigmatic as Silla. His fourth London opera, it was composed in 1713 to a libretto by Giacomo Rossi, also the librettist of the composer s first great London triumph Rinaldo (1711). And that is just about the extent of any certainty on the subject. It might have been premiered in 1713 in London in a private concert at the Queen s Theatre, but even this remains unconfirmed. This is one of Handel s few historical operas, being concerned with Plutarch s account of the latter part of the life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who after taking Rome became a tyrannical despot who murders his opponents, before suddenly retiring to his country estate to enjoy his leisure.

With this second contribution to the Vivaldi Edition, Fabio Biondi and his ensemble Europa Galante sign here the recording of the twentieth opera of the collection - a pasticcio in which Vivaldi ‘recycles’ hit tunes from the ‘World of Warcraft’ operas of his contemporaries.