This interesting
CD celebrates the musical connections between Naples and Madrid.
Between 1503 and 1707 the Kingdom of Naples was effectively
a province ruled by the Spanish king. In many fields, including
music, there was naturally a good deal of cross-fertilisation
between Naples and Madrid – hence the title of this CD. The
traffic of Neapolitan composers to the Spanish court was very
considerable – Domenico Scarlatti, Francesco Corradini, Giovanni
Battista Mele and Niccolò Conforto, to name but a few. Even
in cases where the composers themselves didn’t travel to Spain,
their music very frequently did. As Giulia Anna Romana Veneziano
puts it in the booklet notes to this issue:
“The Spanish archives
testify to this process of assimilation in their innumerable
holdings of works by the most frequently performed Italian composers,
among them Niccolò Porpora, Leonard Leo, Niccolò Jommelli, Niccolò
Piccinni, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Leonard Vinci and Domenico
and Alessandro Scarlatti: the Neapolitan repertory was exported
to Spain through a process of integration with that country’s
own repertory”.
There is no evidence
that Leonardo Vinci ever visited Spain, but the spine of the
present CD is provided by three works preserved in the archives
of the Cathedral de la Virgen del Pilar in Saragossa: Adónde
fugitivo, Triste, ausente, en esta selva and Cuando
infeliz destino. As Veneziano explains “these manuscripts
come with a double text, now no longer Italian but Spanish,
one ‘divino’ and the other ‘humano’, following a well-established
Spanish tradition”.
Adónde fugitivo
is a cantata for alto, solo violin and continuo, an angry
denunciation of a faithless lover by an abandoned lady, sung
here with fitting passion by Cristina Calzolari, though perhaps
with a bit more tremolo in the voice than is entirely desirable.
Cuando infeliz destino is another cantata for
alto, this time with a fuller complement of strings. Both cantatas
follow the same pattern of recitative-aria-recitative-aria.
Cuando infeliz destino is full of quasi-theatrical
effects which remind one of Vinci’s extensive operatic experience.
This time a male lover complains of his ill-treatment by a haughty
beauty; voice (Calzolari again) and instrumental accompaniment
are beautifully dovetailed. Triste, ausente, en esta selva
is a version, with Spanish text, of Vinci’s cantata Mesta,
oh Dio, for soprano, strings and continuo. Its two arias
frame a lengthy recitative and benefit from a very fine performance
by Roberta Invernizzi and the Cappella della Pietà de’Turchini.
Invernizzi sings the difficult opening aria with intensity and
delicacy, her control of pitch and phrase producing very beautiful
results; in the recitative she is powerful in her denunciations
of (yet another) faithless lover, and in the closing aria her
rich decorations of Vinci’s melodic lines are an absolute joy.
This cantata would be enough on its own to make this a valuable
CD.
Not that it is the
only pleasure here. Vinci’s Erighetta e Don Chilone was
written as an intermezzo for Vinci’s opera Ernelinda,
produced Teatro S. Bartolomeo in Naples, 1726. Erighetta (sung
by Invernizzi) is a young widow, Don Chilone (sung by Giuseppe
Naviglio) a wealthy hypochondriac. Much of the work is sustained
by lengthy recitative, performed with great vivacity by singers
and instrumentalists, with enough colour to sustain one’s interest
throughout. It is a notable example of its genre. So too is
the Graziello e Nella of the little-known Giuseppe Petrini,
a piece rediscovered by Antonio Florio, director of Cappella
della Pietà de’Turchini. Here the comedy is rather cruder, a
fact registered in part by the switch from the standard Italian
used in Erighetta e Don Chilone to the Neapolitan
dialect of Graziello e Nella. Insults and bawdry are
exchanged between the elderly woman Nella (sung by a tenor)
and the youthful Graziello (sung by a soprano). The musical
cross-dressing (as it were) gives an additional frisson to the
exchanges and Roberta Invernizzi and Giuseppe de Vittorio revel
in music and text alike. The whole is richly entertaining.
The programme is brought
to a close with a piece from the Spanish theatrical repertoire
which owed much to Neapolitan models, while investing most of
its borrowings with a distinctively Spanish character. This is
the duet ‘Tempestad grande amigo’ from José de Nebra’s zarzuela
of 1744, Vendado es amor, no es ciego. Invernizzi, Vittorio
and Naviglio join forces with the musicians of the Cappella della
Pietà de’Turchini (who are excellent throughout the programme)
in an effervescent celebration of dance’s power to make one forget
the quarrels and conflicts of daily life. It brings a thoroughly
enjoyable CD to a particularly joyous conclusion.
Glyn Pursglove
