Vermiglio

Bianca e Falliero has enough fine music to get the blood boiling, the toes tapping, and the hands clapping. It is strong in rhythmically exciting pieces and showy, virtuosic singing, both of which are in ample supply in this performance. Jennifer Larmore gets through Falliero's music with incredible aplomb and a truly handsome tone. Majella Cullagh's Bianca is just as technically fine as Larmore's Falliero, and she, too, pays close attention to expressing her predicament. Contareno, Bianca's cruel father, is sung by the exciting, accomplished tenor Barry Banks, who seems to understand that Rossini occasionally uses high notes and difficult roulades as expressive weapons. The others in the cast don't let us down. David Parry conducts with an inner tension that keeps the listener riveted. (Robert Levine)

Antonio Florio et son équipe de la Cappella de'Turchini nous ont habitués à de passionnantes découvertes dans le répertoire de leur ville de Naples, au passé musical si riche et pourtant délaissé par la plupart des musiciens.

Every child who ever learnt the recorder or played in a school orchestra will probably know the famous ‘Minuet’ included in the Overture, but they can be forgiven for knowing little else from the work since it is so rarely performed. That its premiere in London in 1737 was a failure had little to do with Handel’s score but more with a growing public indifference to Italian opera. The music, as seasoned Handelians will not need to be told, is of high quality (though not perhaps at once among his most alluring scores), and Antonio Salvis’s libretto, concerned with politics and romance, provides the composer with opportunity for lively duets and evocative ‘simile’ arias. The cast is strong, though not uniformly so, with soprano Julianne Baird in the title role.

Berenice is one of those slightly problematic operas which seem to work better in the theatre where the gender of the characters is (usually) more obvious. Here we have a pair of low voices, one singing a man and one a woman, and a pair of high voices similarly paired. Curtis has chosen a beautifully balanced cast. But it is one where the voices are not highly distinctive so that you sometimes have to concentrate to tell whether Berenice or Alessandro is singing, or Selene or Arsace. If you listen to the opera with the libretto these sort of problems disappear.