Camerata provides the five-star petrol for Cenčić’s Rolls Royce voice.

Concert Hall, QPAC, Brisbane
April 12, 2015

Nowadays, should you find yourself scouring the dust-gathering shelves of Europe’s great music libraries for rare volumes of Vivaldi, Vinci or Porpora, chances are you’ll have to fight off half a dozen countertenors scuttling to and fro in their quest for buried treasure. The current rediscovery of so much baroque repertoire is classical music’s boom industry and few figures yield riches quite like the German composer Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783). Hugely popular and successful in his time, Hasse contracted a celebrity marriage to the famous soprano Faustina Bordoni, was a friend of the likes of JS Bach and the librettist Pietro Metastasio, and was a key figure in the development of opera seria, bridging as he did the period from the high Baroque to the Classical.

In recent years, star Croatian countertenor Max Emanuel Cenčić has been a man on a mission to restore Hasse to his rightful place in the musical firmament. Having released a disc of glittering arias last year (aptly named ‘Rokoko’) he’s followed through with involvement in...