Opera
CD and Other Review

Review: Mozart: Don Giovanni (D’Arcangelo)

The Sferisterio Opera Festival is a summer music festival held in Macerata in the Marche region of Italy under the artistic direction of Pier Luigi Pizzi, popular with Italian audiences for his cool minimalist but determinedly non-regietheater direction.  This 2011 production features star baritone Ildbrando D’Arcangelo surrounded by an ensemble of competent but unfamiliar names under the sprightly, if occasionally fussy, musical direction of Riccardo Frizza. D’Arcangelo is superb with a commanding presence; his dark tone carries a constant threat of violence and his portrayal is the very essence of Mediterranean misogeny. Andrea Concetti is a fine animated Leporello and his relationship with his superior is more intense bro-mance than the usual servant-master dynamic; they’re always playing footsies! He is also rather too familiar with the mentally unhinged Elvira as played by Carmela Remigio. Myrto Papatanasiu as Zerlina stands out for her fine vocalism and noble beauty but her beau is the usual weed and his pledges of revenge are unintentionally comic.  Otherwise humour is a scarce commodity and Pizzi’s direction is drearily low key with one puzzling exception; after a conventional opening scene there was the potential of an interesting psycho-sexual dichotomy with Elvira paying no attention whatsoever to…

April 24, 2015
Opera
CD and Other Review

Review: St Petersburg (Bartoli)

Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli will be remembered in years to come not only for her formidable, many would say matchless, talent as a singer but also for her ability to uncover lost or neglected treasures from the Baroque and early Classical eras. Starting with her Vivaldi album, then with the Salieri and Sacrificium projects to the dazzling Steffani series, the Roman diva has been stamping her considerable personality on a rich vein of musical gold and bringing ‘new’ old music to the wider public. Now, with St Petersburg, she turns her attention to a fascinating period in Russian history, the 18th century when, under three empresses, the nation’s culture and politics were wrenched from the dark ages and brought into the sunshine of western European enlightenment. The troika of Tsaritsas – Anna who reigned from 1730-40, Elizabeth (1741-61) and Catherine the Great (1762-96) – imported Italian musicians and composers and commissioned the first Russian operas. Once performed, though, the scores languished in the archives of St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre until Bartoli came along and set them free. Five composers feature on 11 tracks in this treasure trove of delights, opening appropriately with Neapolitan Francesco Araja, the first of the court…

April 14, 2015