Carnival 1729
Ann Hallenberg, mezzo soprano
Il Pomo d'Oro
Zefira Valova, conductor

1. Nicola Porpora: In braccio al mille furie (from "Semiramide riconoscuita")

2. Geminiano Giacomelli: Mi para senti la bella (from "Gianguir")

3. Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni: Il tua core in dono accetto (from "Filandro")

4. Leonardo Leo: Soffre talor del vento (from "Catone in Utica)

5. Giuseppe Maria Orlandini: Scherza in mar la navicella (from "Adelaide")

6. Nicola Porpora: Bel piacer saria d'un core (from "Semiramide riconoscuita")

7. Leonardo Vinci: Nave altera che in mezzo all onde (from "L'abbandono di Amarda")

In the Republic that saw their birth and transformed opera into an industry, competition between lyric theatres was probably never as fierce and at the same time as fertile as during Carnival. 1729 offers a striking example of this with no less than six productions, revivals or creations by Albinoni, Giacomelli, Leo, Orlandini, Porpora and Vinci, on the bill at the Teatro San Cassiano, the San Giovanni Grisostomo and the San Moisè, where stars such as Faustina ( Bordoni), Farinelli and Senesino. Thirteen world premieres, edited by Holger Schmitt-Hallenberg, make up this rich anthology, Ann Hallenberg also taking on, with a greedy velocity, Porpora's aria "In braccio a mille furie" (Semiramide riconosciuta) resurrected by Cecilia Bartoli (Sacrificium). After exploring the avatars of the figure of Agrippina in the 17th and 18th centuries, the singer renews the exercise of the recital once again and offers us a magnificent lesson in bel canto.

Having successfully measured herself against Farinelli and the extravagant Marchesi , Ann Hallenberg has nothing left to prove in terms of virtuosity; moreover, trying to outdo her in pyrotechnics, assuming that it were possible, would risk tiring even her most rabid admirers of acrobatics. The rapid movements, with their wild coloraturas, their leaps in register tailor-made for the prowess of Faustina or Gizzi (the dizzying "Soffre talor del vento" in Leo's Catone in Utica) are certainly not missing, but it is above all in the canto di maniera and the cantabile that the artist delights us and even manages to surprise us. Beyond the instrument, this slightly amber mezzo, long and on whose flexibility time seems to have almost no hold, we surrender before the elegance and refinement of the ornamentation, generous in trills, but without excess, and which, supreme virtue, subtly relaunches the discourse. It is impossible not to think of the terms that the historian Stefano Arteaga used in 1787 to describe this ability to "express the most tenuous gradations, to differentiate the sound from the way the most subtle, to make the most impalpable nuances felt." The slightest chiselling is part of an admirably constructed interpretation and yet so fluid that it gives the illusion of spontaneity. To hide art by art itself would say Branch.

свернуть