Gramophone – September 2019

104 GRAMOPHONE SEPTEMBER 2019 gramophone.co.uk

Opera

MikeAshmanonMarschner’srarely

heardyetinfluentialHansHeiling:

RichardOsborneenjoysRossini’s

IlbarbierefromVerona:

Cavalli

L’Ipermestra

ElenaMontisop....................................................Ipermestra

EmanuelaGallimez.....................................................Linceo

GaëlleLeRoisop................................................................Elisa

MarcelBeekmanten...............................................Berenice

SergioForestibass........................................................Danao

MarkTuckerten.........................................................Arbante

LaSferaArmoniosa/ MikeFentross

ChallengeClassicsMcCC72774(166’• DDD)

RecordedliveatStadsschouwburgUtrecht,

August24, 2006

IncludessynopsisandItalianlibretto

Cavalli 3

Gliamorid’Apolloe diDafne

AndersDahlinten..........................................................Apollo

RosaDomínguezmez..................................................Dafne

EmanuelaGallisop......................................................Aurora

StephanVanDyckten.................................................Cefalo

PaolaQuagliatasop....................................................Amore

MaríaHinojosaMontenegrosop..........................Filena

MarisúPavónsop.........................................................Procris

FurioZanasibar........................................Alfesibeo/Sonno

PaulinBündgencounterten.......................................Cirilla

MarianaRewerskymez..............................Venere/Musa

SalvoVitalebass..............................................................Giove

ValerioContaldoten........................................Pan/Morfeo

EnsembleElyma/ GabrielGarrido

GlossaBb 3 GCD923519(156’• DDD)

FromK617211/12(2008)

IncludessynopsisandItalianlibretto

Released in the last couple of months, this

striking pair of Cavalli recordings were

both actually made more than a decade ago.

Marking the work’s first appearance on disc,

Channel Classics gives us Mike Fentross

and La Sfera Armoniosa’s L’Ipermestra,

recorded live at the opera’s first modern

performance, in Utrecht during the 2006

Holland Early Music Festival. Glossa,

meanwhile, has reissued Gabriel Garrido’s

2008 Ensemble Elyma recording of Gli

amori d’Apollo e di Dafne, originally released

on the French K617 label, though not

reviewed in these pages at the time.

L’Ipermestra was first performed in

Florence in 1658 to celebrate the birth

of the first son of Phillip IV of Spain. The

subject, which ostensibly sits uneasily with

the circumstances of the premiere (though

the underlying theme is the need for

dynastic preservation), is a variant on the

myth of the Danaïdes, the 50 daughters of

the Argive king Danaus, married to their

cousins, the 50 sons of King Aegyptus of

Egypt, 49 of whom were murdered by their

wives on their wedding nights at Danaus’s

insistence, after an oracle prophesied he

would meet his death at the hands of one of

his nephews. Only Ipermestra, in love with

her husband Linceo, refuses to take part in

this bloodbath, and engineers his escape, to

her father’s fury. Back in Egypt, however,

Linceo is conned by Danaus’s general

Arbante, who loves Ipermestra himself,

into believing her unfaithful, and Argos

and Egypt are soon at war.

When Glyndebourne staged the opera

two years ago, many commented that the

proportion of recitative to aria or arioso

was excessively high, which sidesteps the

subtlety of Cavalli’s methodology. Despite

the ostensibly happy ending, and the

comedic interjections of Ipermestra’s

nurse Berenice (six times married and

now looking for husband number seven),

L’Ipermestra’s dramaturgy is rooted in

classical tragedy and therefore dependent

on declamation for much of its effect. It

is the flexibility of Cavalli’s recitatives,

frequently veering towards the grander

contours of melody in a quest for

psychological veracity, that gives the

work its often hypnotic force.

Fentross’s performance is superb,

though some, I suspect, might find it

eccentric. The realisation is his own,

undertaken in collaboration with the

organist Jolando Scarpa, and the results

are unusual. A sackbut as well as low strings

pick out Cavalli’s bass lines, which adds an

extraordinary sombreness of tone to the

whole enterprise. Fentross’s conducting

is swift and urgent, allowing the big

confrontations to register with great

immediacy. Some of the voices are perhaps

bigger than we usually find in Baroque

music. Mark Tucker’s Arbante, in

particular, sounds dark and weighty, if

suitably obsessive and pressurising. Elena

Monti really gets inside Ipermestra’s

conflict between love for Emanuela Galli’s

warm-voiced Linceo and filial duty towards

Sergio Foresti’s overbearing Danao. Marcel

Beekman makes a camp, funny Berenice,

and Gaëlle Le Roi is touching as Elisa,

Ipermestra’s lady-in-waiting and Arbante’s

much-put-upon ex. It’s a fine achievement.

There is, however, one maddening

drawback in that the accompanying

booklet only gives us the libretto in Italian,

a problem that also besets Garrido’s Gli

amori. The work itself was first performed

in Venice in 1640. Giovanni Busanello’s

erudite libretto derives from Ovid,

weaving together multiple tales from

the Metamorphoses to form a complex

disquisition on the nature of desire and

its attendant catastrophes. The story of

Apollo’s unrequited love for Daphne forms

the kernel of the plot, though twining its

way in and out of the main narrative is

a counterplot dealing with the goddess

Aurora’s affair with the mortal Cefalo,

to the ignorance of her husband Tithonus

and the horror of his wife Procris, whose

anguished lament forms a real heart of

darkness at the centre of a score that is

otherwise often strikingly erotic.

Garrido captures both its sensual mood

and dark undertones wonderfully well,

though he can be fractionally too languid

and could do, on occasion, with some of

Fentross’s impetuosity. It’s finely played

and for the most part beautifully sung. Rosa

Domínguez’s Dafne fends off the attentions

of Anders Dahlin’s handsome-sounding

Apollo with assertive dignity. Galli, the

only singer common to both sets, is the

persuasive, beguiling Aurora, and her

scenes with Stephan Van Dyck’s bewildered

yet enraptured Cefalo really do send shivers

down your spine. At the centre of it all,

Marisú Pavón sings Procris’s lament with a

quiet intensity that resonates down through

‘Wagner’s borrowings fromeveryaspectof

Marschner’s opera have helpedtokeepatleast

its name before the public’ REVIEW ON PAGE 108

‘Some will find this “traditional”tothepoint

of being museum-ready,butotherswillvalue

its honesty and humour’ REVIEW ON PAGE 110