Lume Aspta

Galuppi's score is tuneful and amusing, if not profound – and the libretto by Goldini is really just a farce. It is given a spendid performance by relatively unknown forces, who are all amazingly good – enough to make me look up whatever else they may have recorded. This is a studio (actually a church) recording, rather than a live performance, and is in a much clearer rendition than is common to this sort of music. All together, an excellent set, which promises to give great pleasure over long periods of time.

The Network Media Cooperative (Network Medien-Cooperative) was founded in October 1979 – by April 1990 we had already issued 19 titles, at the time as audio-cassettes with a comprehensive booklet in a small package that looked like a chocolate box. The covers and layouts were produced using Letraset on a light-table installed over a bath tub. Among those first records were the musical themes that were to preoccupy us for 30 years: an extensive document of the “Gypsies Music Festival”; meanwhile the music of the Roma has been documented on numerous Network CDs, including the anthology “Road of the Gypsies” (often copied but never achieving the same level). A double musíccasette packet was devoted to cult music from Haiti and the sounds and life philosophy of the Rastafarians in Jamaica. Recording trips were undertaken, among others, to Cuba, Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Curacao, but also to Latin America, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Belize. We also approached the music worlds of Africa in our portrait of the South African pianist and vocalist Dollar Brand (today Abdullah Ibrahim) and in the first studio recordings of Soukous music. These were followed by trips to Liberia, Senegal, Mali, Tanzania, Zanzibar.

With this original jackets’ box set Deutsche Grammophon concludes its series of 4 grand sets that present almost the totality of Herbert von Karajan’s output for the Yellow Label – and hence perhaps the most magnificent legacy in the history of recorded music. On 70 CDs “KARAJAN – THE OPERA RECORDINGS” features the 14 operas Karajan recorded for DGG – from “Carmen” to “Parsifal”, from “The Merry Widow” to “Rosenkavalier”, from Mozart to Puccini. And, of course, the complete “Ring”.

La diavolessa dates some way into the Galuppi/Goldoni canon, being the 13th of their joint ventures. It was first given during November 1755 at Teatro San Samuele in Venice, and like many of Galuppi’s operas soon traveled beyond the confines of Italy, being taken up in Leipzig and Prague in the year following its Venetian premiere. The motivational force of the plot is greed, but Goldoni also has some pertinent observations on social status to make. The action centers round the Naples home of Don Poppone, a wealthy fool obsessed by the belief that there is hidden treasure in his cellar.

The name of Leonardo Vinci, not to be confused with Leonardo da Vinci, is little known today, but he succeeded in the intensely competitive opera scene of the 1720s in Naples, at that time one of the greatest cities in the world. His comic operas were among the first to break up the Baroque style and push it toward the simplicity and lightness to come, but here the focus is on opera seria, which he wrote in abundance and for which he commanded libretti from Pietro Metastasio and other top writers of the day.