Florence, May 2nd, 1589: on occasion of the wedding of the Grand Duke Ferdinando I and Christina of Lorraine an impressive celebration apparatus was put up to display the magnificence of the Medici household. Behind this official event lay an ambitious project which involved an incredible team of the most important poets and musicians of the time, such as Cristofano Malvezzi, Luca Marenzio, Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, Emilio De’ Cavalieri as well as Count Giovanni De’ Bardi, who was engaged to compose the Intermedi for Girolamo Bargagli’s play La Pellegrina. Renaissance intermediums were sumptuous musical interludes inserted between the acts of a theatrical show on allegorical and moral themes with eclectic references to classical mythology. They are considered as the forerunners of musical opera. The spectacular show, which was performed using a complex stage machinery set up in Palazzo Pitti’s Boboli gardens, was an immediate success, so much that the intermediums were performed in the days to follow during another two plays. The Six intermediums in La Pellegrina provide for choral madrigals, double and triple choirs, solo accompanied numbers and instrumental pieces, inserted into the impressive and sumptuous staging by Bernando Buontalenti. 430 years later, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in collaboration with Galleria Degli Uffizi produces the first staging in modern times of the Intermedi della Pellegrina through an itinerant show in Palazzo Pitti’s Boboli Gardens. Stage director Valentino Villa’s approach was to “attempt at an ironic historical reconstruction, [where] imageries blur together, classical mythology is grafted onto contemporary iconography”. Conductor Federico Maria Sardelli leads Modo Antiquo and Chorus Master Alberto Allegrezza is at the head of Coro Ricercare Ensemble and Compagnia Dramatodìa.

Antonio Vandini was born around 1690 in Bologna, the city where the cello knew its first glories as a solo instrument. He held several assignments in Bergamo, Venice and later Padua, where he developed a friendship with Giovanni Tartini. His virtuosity was brought to fame by Charles Burney who defined him “the famous old Antonio Vandini on the violoncello who, the Italians say, plays and expresses a parlare, that is in such a manner as to make his instrument speak.” Vandini’s cello works are the apex of the instrument’s output of his time, for the persistent exploration of the high register, the frequent use of double stopping, arpeggios and chords even in unusual combinations, a variety of bowing techniques, and rapid passages. The works recorded on this release represent his complete output and are played by the specialist period ensemble L’ Arte dell’Arco, as usual on period instruments, using the original under-hand bow technique invented by Vandini himself. Cellist Francesco Galligioni declared “when one uses the underhand grip, the cello has a particular sound. It is very much 'inside the instrument', very present, but with a completely different articulation from what we are used to. I believe that those who perform early music have a responsibility to explore obsolete practices and return to the genuine sound of the period, a varied sound which has perhaps been lost today. I did not use a grip in imitation of the one used for the viola da gamba, but I wrapped the palm around the frog as Vandini seems to be doing in Ghezzi’s caricatures.”

This opera was recorded at the 2019 Festival Verdi in a new coproduction from Teatro Regio di Parma and Teatro Comunale di Bologna. I due Foscari, a tragedia lirica in three acts based on a work by Lord Byron, was premiered in 1844. It proved quite popular for the next fifty years, thanks in part to its brevity and ease of staging; in fact it’s Verdi's shortest opera. The composer also revised the libretto by the rather inexperienced Francesco Maria Piave. From the musical point of view, this work is characterized by extreme simplicity of form and by the use of distinctive themes for each character, reminiscent of the Leitmotiv technique. The simple plot describes the mortal hatred between a Venetian gentleman, Jacopo Loredano, and two members of the Foscari family - the Doge Francesco and his son Jacopo - whom Loredano holds responsible for the deaths of his father and uncle. The effectiveness of this recording stems from both the cast of singers (notably Vladimir Stoyanov in the role of Francesco Foscari) and the orchestra under Paolo Arrivabeni's direction Paolo Arrivabeni is a highly experienced, international conductor who specializes in this repertoire.

VERDI: Lombardi alla prima crociata (I)

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Before starting to work at Nabucodonosor, which will later become his iconic Nabucco, Giuseppe Verdi was on the verge of abandoning music, discouraged as he was by the flop of his second opera. He then received a libretto by Temistocle Solera almost by chance, as it was destined to another composer. Verdi was very reluctant to put himself to work, but later he referred that one night he “threw the manuscript on the table […]. the booklet opened: unwillingly, my eyes were drawn to the page that was before them and on these verses: ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate’”. So he started focusing on the task and “one day one verse, the next day another verse, a note and a phrase at a time, […] little by little the opera was composed”. The rest is history. Nabucodonosor was a triumph, the public of La Scala, on the night of 9th March 1842, repaid him with an unprecedented success hailing all the numbers of the opera with warm ovations and paying a special tribute to the chorus Va’, pensiero, sull’ali dorate, which in Italy has since become a sort of second national anthem. The reasons of such a success were that the opera possessed such force in itself, such simplicity and smoothness of style that made it the perfect example of tragic opera. This production has been filmed at the 2019 Festival Verdi in Parma. It’s a very powerful and engaging creative project by 2018 Abbiati prize winner duo Ricci/Forte. The most striking feature of this staging is that the action takes place in 2046 on a military ship, which reminds us of an Ark. This performance portrays a dystopic society where we can find many references to real contemporary events. Nabucco is turned into an oppressive dictator who is obsessed with his own image. The Hebrew slaves are portrayed as refugees wearing life vests, while on the ship deck various screens are used to display the regime’s propaganda.

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Le Villi is an opera-ballet in two acts that marked Giacomo Puccini’s debut in the world of opera. It was first staged at Teatro dal Verme in Milan in 1884. Librettist Ferdinando Fontana based the story on the ancient legend of the Willis, fantastic creatures representing the souls of young women who were the victims of love. Anna and Roberto are engaged, but during a trip the man is seduced by a woman and his fiancée dies of heartbreak. Roberto, who is by then abandoned and left penniless, is haunted by remorse and attacked by the revengeful fairies and Anna’s ghost. All the elements of the more mature Puccini are already recognizable: the characters of Anna and Roberto anticipate the “love victim” and the “man without qualities” archetypes of his later operas, whereas some of the composer’s touches of harmony and aria structure foresee his future success. This rare work was chosen to open the 2018-2019 season of Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the performance received very good reviews. “Le Villi is an opera full of excellent music, where Puccini’s future grandeur is already recognizable. This production mingles essentiality, intelligence and youth” (Gbopera.it) “Conductor Marco Angius delivers a fierce and passionate performance and under his baton the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is able to convey all the various shades of the score.” (Gbopera.it)

Parma native Ferdinando Paer, who wrote more than 50 operas, composed Agnese in 1809 for a private entertainment and a company of amateur singers. In 1824, with a few changes to the score, this opera semiseria in two acts reached the Theathre- Italien in Paris where it gained international success; among its early admirers were Berlioz, Chopin and Victor Hugo who mentioned it in his Les Misérables but a few decades after its première it fell into oblivion. In modern times it was first revived in concert form by Conductor Diego Fasolis and finally, in 2019 with the addition of a critical revision, it was performed at the Teatro Regio di Torino. The plot presents several fairy-tale elements, which are very well realized through the stage setting. When Agnese elopes with her beloved Ernesto, her father Uberto loses his mind and believes her dead. He is therefore hospitalized into a mental institution, where most of the action takes place. In the Ospedale dei pazzi sympathetic doctors, security guards and administrators try to help Uberto regain his sanity, to no avail. In the meanwhile, Agnese, betrayed and abandoned by Ernesto, to whom she bore a daughter, goes back to her father to ask for forgiveness, unaware of his troubles. Ernesto is repentant of his philandering ways and follows Agnese to win her back. The opera ends with Uberto regaining his mental clarity when he hears Agnese sing an old song, and a general reconciliation occurs. In director Leo Muscato’s words “the most interesting aspect of this opera…is the irony that is present from the beginning to the end of the story” which imbues even the most dramatic circumstances. The set design for this wonderful, world premiere on video opera, is made of a series of movable boxes which are similar to carillons and which open-up displaying different environments.

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Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a child prodigy whose early genius was recognized and admired by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Giacomo Puccini. His musical style, deeply affected by music for the theatre, possessed great lyrical breadth; he managed to develop his own voice by blending all the different influences he absorbed in Vienna during his studies. The advent of Nazism in 1934 forced him to seek refuge in the United States, where he became the first composer of film scores, winning two Oscars and marking a milestone in the Hollywood film industry. Teatro Regio di Torino has contributed to the rediscovery of this precious one-act opera by staging its Italian premiere. Violanta is Korngold's second opera, which the composer wrote in 1914 at the age of 17. It was premiered with great success at Munich’s Hoftheater on 28 March 1916, and a few days later in Vienna. The influence of the Austrian capital is key to understanding Korngold’s style. From the late 1800s to the early 1900s Vienna was a place of contrasts: nostalgia for the past and innovative trends; conservatism and creative energy. Korngold grew up in this environment, absorbing various influences which are all present in Violanta, making this opera a sort of 'small-scale Vienna'. Pier Luigi Pizzi, stage director, costume and lighting designer for this production, chose to set the action at the beginning of the 1920s in a decadent Venice, where distant echoes of a melancholic Carnival add a sense of gloom to the whole performance.

This release is entitled Donizetti Heroines because many of the composer’s operas are named after their female protagonists. Even in the few cases where they aren’t, they give musical portrayals of unforgettable female characters, tragic and passionate figures, often innocent victims of the infernal gears of power and therefore destined to a hapless fate. Between 1818 and 1843 Gaetano Donizetti composed some seventy operas, many of which became very popular in his day. His first success came in 1830 with Anna Bolena and from that moment he rivaled Bellini as the ‘leading operatic composer in Italy’, churning out works with the constant rhythm of a typical 18th-century composer. Some of Donizetti’s best works rank among the masterpieces of 19th-century opera. A few of them have remained in the repertoire worldwide since their debut, while others were to be revived only from the second half of the 1900s, in the wake of what has rightly been called the ‘Donizetti Renaissance’. Today operatic audiences are radically different from those of two hundred years ago and during the 2018/19 season Donizetti was placed fifth in the list of the world’s most represented composers. We believe that the credit for this goes to his splendid heroines and their great interpreters who, yesterday and today, brought them alive on stage and continue to do so. This collectors’ release offers a selection of nine operas featuring some of the most iconic and unforgettable Donizetti characters, performed by outstanding singers such as Mariella Devia, Jessica Pratt, Carmela Remigio, Patrizia Ciofi and Sonia Ganassi.

In the early 1670s, soon after Venetian opera became established in Naples, a series of comic figures began to inhabit secular but also sacred operas. These stock characters included the Neapolitan, the Calabrian and the Boy, and all three plus a fourth, 'The Spaniard', appear in a comic intermezzo inserted in the 1673 opera Il disperato innocente by the little-known Francesco Antonio Boero. This is the oldest surviving Neapolitan comic intermezzo, and, along with it's Prologue, seems to have been written by other authors. This video preserves a historically informed performance given by Antonio Florio with Pino de Vittorio that explores the tradition of the intermezzo in 17th century plots.

The term 'Baroque' in music covers a period of around 150 years, from 1600 to 1750, and this collection of six operatic masterpieces shows the diversity of musical experience to be found from this era. All of these excellent Maggio Musicale Fiorentino productions were recorded in Florence, a city that was witness to the origins of opera and saw it's rise in popularity with leading names such as Monteverdi and Vivaldi. Lully and Handel represent opera's spread throughout Europe and it's adaptation to national tastes, establishing theatrical traditions of romance and tragedy that are still universal to audiences today

There was a remarkable outpouring of Italian instrumental music from the 17th century onwards yet many composers who contributed to this flourishing body of work remain relatively unknown. One such composer is Pietro Marchitelli who was born around 1643 and was active in Naples as an outstanding violinist. Some 30 sonatas survive in a small number of collections. The seven lively and tuneful sonatas on this album conform to the precedent established by Corelli and are played by Labirinto Armonico, an ensemble that has collaborated with some of the very best early music performers.

Misattributed in the past to composers such as Pergolesi, the enduring success of Pietro Auletta's L'Orazio saw it staged and adapted so many times over the centuries that it's original 1737 structure is now lost. This is the opera's first revival in modern times. The style of L'Orazio reflects the end of the Baroque period at a time in which refined galant and pre-Classical inflections were taking hold. The work's comic narrative of romantic complications and rivalries take place amidst scenarios in which the music lessons of maestro Lamberto alternate with dubious theatrical engagements and carnival masquerades.

In celebration of his 80th birthday, this four-disc set spans more than five decades of Michael Tilson Thomas' compositional career. It features 18 works, from premiere recordings to remastered archival recordings available for the first time. The deluxe collection also includes an extensive booklet containing composer's notes, original essays, and a timeline of archival photos chronicling MTT's life as a pianist, conductor, composer, recording artist, and teacher.

All proceeds from GRACE: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas will be donated to brain cancer research at the University of California, San Francisco Brain Tumor Center.

Here is a brief historical background to Ugo, conte di Parigi. He was Hugues Capet, a powerful feudal lord in the 10th century. When the Carolingian dynasty (successors of Charlemagne) died out with the childless Louis V (Luigi) in 987, Hugues was elected king of France, becoming the founder of the Capetian dynasty that ruled the country until 1328, the onset of the Valois kings. A five-act French play by Hyppolyte Bis called Blanche d’Acquitaine ou le dernier des Carlovingiens (1827) dealt with the dark and deadly intrigues that preceded the death of young Louis V. Five years later, Felice Romani forged an opera libretto for Gaetano Donizetti from the play’s basic ingredients, eliminating many of the drama’s characters, most of its complications, and, regrettably, much of its cohesiveness. But Romani cannot be entirely blamed for the opera’s deficiencies. Regicide and adultery lay at the foundation of the Bis play, elements not acceptable to the Milanese censorship of the 1830s. By the time the censors had done their work, the embittered Romani refused to have his name associated with the opera.

Ugo was introduced at La Scala on March 13, 1832, during a feverishly productive period in Donizetti’s career, accounting for 11 operas between 1830 and 1832. Anna Bolena and L’elisir d’amore represent the peak of his achievements during those two years, but Bellini’s Norma (December 26, 1831) may have played an even more important part in the short life of Ugo. Felice Romani was the librettist for both operas, and both shared the same legendary principals: sopranos Giuditta Pasta and Giulia Grisi, and tenor Domenico Donzelli. But, while Norma’s subsequent path consisted of a series of triumphs, Ugo dropped from currency soon after the premiere, and lay dormant until its first complete recording (Opera Rara ORC 1) in 1977. Elements of Ugo were eventually recycled by Donizetti for his later operas, as detailed in Danilo Prefumo’s informative annotations with the Dynamic set. Ugo may be the opera’s title character, but the true principals are the rival Aquitaine princesses Bianca and Adelia, for whom Donizetti contrived attractive duets somewhat similar to the Norma-Adalgisa confrontations, though not on the level of inspiration that distinguishes the Bellini models. Bianca is betrothed to King Luigi, but refuses to marry him. In secret, she loves Ugo, who is in love with Adelia. During the opera, the initially sympathetic Bianca gradually reveals hysterical tendencies and, when she discovers Adelia’s commitment to Ugo, her frenzy drives her to suicide. The opera’s ending is inconclusive, not to say clumsy: King Luigi is still alive, Ugo is still “Conte di Parigi,” and Emma, the mother of the rival sisters, is tormented by a guilty past the libretto fails to clarify, though Jeremy Commons’s extensive notes to the Opera Rara set provide some interesting speculations.

That earlier set, with its prominent British performers, is marginally preferable to the more recent Bergamo live recording, which features a young but attractive international cast of singers unfamiliar to me and not otherwise identified in the notes. Dynamic’s rather boxy sound, in all ways inferior to its 1977 predecessor, is still quite acceptable.

Dynamic’s notes contain a disclaimer, crediting soprano Dimitriu for performing “despite a slight illness.” She is quite a trooper, though, because her portrayal of Bianca is passionate in its commitment and quite virtuosic in execution, particularly in the chromatic runs of the cabaletta “No, che infelice appieno” (I, 8). The role is quite demanding, and Ms. Dimitriu fearlessly rises to all its challenges. Carmen Giannattasio’s portrayal of the gentler Adelia is also above reproach; in her very effective duet with Ugo (I, 19), she far surpasses her tenor partner’s acceptable but uneven contribution. Dramatically, the opera’s finale leaves the listener somewhat shortchanged, but the solid Emma (mezzo Milijana Nikolic) and the frenetic Bianca (Doina Dimitriu) leave no tone unturned.

Donizetti wrote the part of the young King Luigi for a mezzo-soprano, and Opera Rara’s Della Jones performs it admirably. Dynamic has chosen a male alto (Sym Tokyurek), tonally less secure but quite appropriate in capturing a certain weakness and immaturity in the young king’s character. Weakest in the cast is the unfocused baritone interpreter of Folco di Angiò (read Anjou), a mean-spirited intriguer who drops out of the action toward the end, missed by no one. Comparison with the Opera Rara set reveals several minor cuts, primarily in the second act; since Dynamic is contained on two CDs, not three, this is a minor consideration.

Musically, Ugo, conte di Parigi is not a negligible work at all, rich in well-crafted ensembles, such as the powerful act I finale and the chorus-supported Trio in act II (II, 10). Its absence from the repertoire is due to the wealth of so many Donizetti operas that are both stronger and make more sense on stage.

George Jellinek, FANFARE