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Reviewer:
Richard
Wigmore Gender-bending, sometimes with an element of titillation, was a commonplace of Baroque opera. When Johann Adolf Hasse’s serenata was staged on a country estate near Naples in 1725, the elite audience would not have batted an eyelid that the role of Cleopatra was taken by the 20-year-old soprano castrato Carlo Broschi, aka Farinelli, and that of Mark Antony by contralto Vittoria Tesi. Both singers would soon be superstars. Savouring their vocal prowess, the newly Italianised Hasse created a score whose melodic allure and deft characterisation – plus its final sycophantic tribute to the ruling Habsburgs – made it an instant hit.
Some of the lyrical arias, especially Mark Antony’s final vision of the Elysian Fields, adopt the smooth, clearly articulated melodic style of the emerging galant manner. But listening ‘blind’, you might mistake the more vigorous numbers for Hasse’s teacher Alessandro Scarlatti, or even Handel. Cleopatra has the most forceful and memorable music, above all in the tumultuous aria in which she resolves to commit suicide. Understandably, this casting here does not seek to replicate the original gender reversal. Abetted by coruscating (if rather too forwardly recorded) playing from the strings of Le Musiche Nove, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, slender but keenly focused of tone, sings with terrific verve and commitment. She nicely catches the mingled ironic mockery and steely resolve of Cleopatra’s character (some way from the sex kitten in Handel’s near-contemporary Giulio Cesare), bringing a native Italian’s relish to the text, in aria and recitative, and using Hasse’s coloratura flights to enhance the expression. Mazzulli spins a touchingly pure line, too, in the final aria where Cleopatra faces death with stoic melancholy.
As in Plutarch and Shakespeare, Mark Antony cuts a more passive figure, a nostalgically inclined ageing lover rather than a warrior hero. Sounding uncannily like a countertenor with freely produced top notes, Alaskan mezzo Vivica Genaux is ideally cast as Mark Antony. Tender without mawkishness in his avowals of devotion, Genaux rises thrillingly to the moment where Mark Antony is shaken from elegiac mode to vent his despair at the prospect of Cleopatra’s death. Conducted with fire and sensibility, eloquently sung and characterised, this new recording makes a vivid case for a work that helped launch the most spectacular operatic career of the age. |
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