Roby Accademia Del Caos

Joyce DiDonato becomes more interesting and more of a complete artist with each performance and recording. Even though we are living in a time of great coloratura mezzos (Bartoli, Genaux), DiDonato still stands out. A video of her Dejanira in Handel's Hercules a few years ago alerted us to the fact that she wasn't just another pretty Rosina and Cenerentola; indeed, she had fine dramatic chops as well. Well, while she remains the Rosina and Cenerentola of choice, with this CD she seems poised to enter the dramatic-Rossini-role sweepstakes as well, heretofore the property of Gencer, Caballé, Sutherland, and in one case, Callas.

On stage they’re usually rivals, but in real life Jonas Kaufmann and Ludovic Tézier share a close friendship. After many live performances together these two extraordinary artists have recorded their first duet album: “Insieme”, meaning “together” in Italian, to be released on Sony Classical. Accompanied by the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Antonio Pappano, they present duets they’ve sung together on stage, plus works specially chosen for the album.

French soprano Sandrine Piau, despite her frequent appearances on Baroque recordings, may not seem a first choice for the sheer athleticism of Handel, but wait until you hear her. Piau substitutes grace, precision, and sheer beauty for brawn, and the results are astonishing. She chooses arias ideally suited to her talents. "Rejoice greatly," from Messiah, is full of spiky flash, and lengthy pieces like "Prophetic raptures swell my breast" (track 12), from Joseph and His Brethren, are beautifully developed, with Piau sliding with impossible smoothness into high notes in the later stages. Passagework in faster pieces is a shower of bright sparks, while in "Sweet bird," from L'allegro, il penseroso, ed il moderato (track 16), you will become deliciously disoriented after a while as to whether it is Piau or one of the instruments providing the bird effects.

Most of Vivaldi's operas were composed for Venice, but between 1718 and 1720, he was in the employ the Austrian governor of Mantua, and he composed Tito Manlio for the governor's wedding celebration. The wedding never took place, but the opera was performed in 1719. The Mantuan court was very wealthy, and this is clear from the lavish scoring of Manlio: in addition to the usual strings, Vivaldi uses horns, trumpets, oboes, bassoon, two different registers of flutes, timpani and viola d'amore.

With this new recording, the madly epic and romantic opera, Il Giustino, finally receives its place in the spotlight, something that the history of music has denied it up until now. The fifty-eighth recording and eighteenth opera in the Vivaldi Edition, which began in 2000, solidifies the status of Vivaldi as the greatest of opera composers - and of composers full stop. It needed the talent, charisma and poetic energy of a great conductor to bring back to life this gem, and it is Ottavio Dantone who assumes this mantle.