Leo+gura

Presented by the Festival della Valle d’Itria, this is the first modern-day staging of Leonardo Leo’s Neapolitan revision of Handel’s Rinaldo, a pastiche with a Mediterranean allure, which was composed in 1718 but considered lost until a few years ago. The story behind this rare opera is fascinating: the score of Handel’s masterpiece was brought illegally to Naples by the castrato singer Nicolò Grimaldi, who had performed Rinaldo in London. Once in Italy, the work was given a makeover by local composers, including Leo, who adapted it to the taste of the Neapolitan public, adding intermezzos and amusing characters.

According to the obituary written by his son Carl Philip Emmanuel and his former pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola, Johann Sebastian Bach composed five Passions, including “one for two choirs” (the St Matthew Passion). However, only two of them have survived in their entirety. A third one, the St Mark Passion, has given rise to various reconstructions, and the last two, if they at all existed, are irretrievably lost. Of the two Passions that have come down to us, the St John Passion was the first to be composed; Bach had it performed for the first time in the St Nicholas Church less than a year after taking up his post in Leipzig, on 7 April 1724 (he had taken the liberty of announcing it to the St Thomas Church, which earned him a reprimand; he got away with a somewhat ironic letter of apology).

Gerard Hugh "Leo" Sayer is an English-Australian singer-songwriter musician and entertainer whose singing career has spanned four decades. He is now an Australian citizen and resident. Sayer launched his career in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and became a top singles and album act on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1970s. His first seven hit singles in the United Kingdom all reached the Top 10 – a feat first registered by his first manager, Adam Faith. His songs have been sung by other notable artists, including Cliff Richard ("Dreaming").

Richard Perry's 1978 production of the self-titled Leo Sayer album is one of the artist's most serious and heartfelt, though it only generated a minor hit in the cover of the Boudleau Bryant/Felice Bryant tune "Raining in My Heart." With Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham on electric guitar, Waddy Wachtel on slide guitar, and Ben Benay on acoustic, the performance and production of that particular song offers much on an album that is equally impressive. James Brown/Russell Smith's "Dancing the Night Away," with David Lindley's important and unobtrusive fiddle and steel guitar, and "Stormy Weather," the Tom Snow/Leo Sayer collaboration which opens the album, all work in unison, providing evidence that Sayer had superstardom just within his grasp.

There's something about the purling, snarling and booting of a baritone sax that can create pleasant disturbances in the listener's spine and rib cage. Leo Parker came up during the simultaneous explosions of bebop and rhythm & blues. Everything he touched turned into a groove. Recording for Savoy in Detroit during the autumn of 1947, Leo was flanked by Howard McGhee and Gene Ammons, who at this point seems to have been operating under the influence of Lester Young. Leo does his own share of Prez-like one-note vamping, bringing to mind some of Lester's Aladdin recordings made during this same time period. Leo's Savoys originally appeared on 78 rpm platters, then on 10" long-playing records…

Pan flutist Leo Rojas (full name: Juan Leonardo Santillia Rojas) was born in Ecuador in 1984 and is best known for winning the 2011 season of the German casting show Das Supertalent. Rojas moved to Spain in 2000 and then to Germany, living in Berlin with his Polish wife; he often performed as a street musician until a passer-by informed him about the casting show. He became a contestant in the show's fifth season, succeeding to the semi-finals with his rendition of "El Condór Pasa" (best known in a 1970 version by Simon & Garfunkel) and then winning the show with a cover of "Einsamer Hirte," a hit song written by James Last and performed by Gheorghe Zamfir in 1977.

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.