Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia / Antonio Pappano VERDI Otello

OTELLO

Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi GIUSEPPE VERDI Macbeth

A vivid demonstration of how widely Fabio Biondi’s musical imagination runs comes with his new recording of Giuseppe Verdi’s work of genius, Macbeth. It is the original Florentine 1847 version of the work, shorn of the Paris revisions more typically found on record, which Fabio Biondi has opted to conduct, the director believing in its greater dramatic and stylistic coherence.

Verdi was of the opinion that the Shakespearean tragedy was “one of the greatest creations of the human spirit” and set himself the task of rendering the fire of its drama into music during and following a period when his physical health had broken down. With its scenes of murder, battle and sleep-walking, brindisi and witches’ choruses all creating a sombre atmosphere drenched with paranoia and a lust for power, the dramatic flow of the opera places vast demands on the soloists, notably upon the unhappy title-role couple.

Fabio Biondi’s version comes with baritone Giovanni Meoni, a leading Verdi specialist as Macbeth whilst the larger-than-life role of Lady Macbeth is taken by a noted present-day Salome, Médée (and Medea), the soprano Nadja Michael. Bass Fabrizio Beggi assumes the part of Banquo, both when alive and as a ghost. Important also in the work (and as described by Stefano Russomanno in his accompanying essay) is the chorus, a leading protagonist for the composer, and here the Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic Choir.

Critical also is Verdi’s orchestral writing for Macbeth, introducing rare and radical tonal colourings and Fabio Biondi, directing his Europa Galante from the violin, is just the radical, challenging musical spirit to breathe new life into Verdi’s masterpiece and its search for dramatic truth.

Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi G.F. HANDEL Imeneo (Serenata "Hymen" - Dublin, 1742)

Fabio Biondi signs his fifth release on Glossa with a further opera exploration, here with Europa Galante and providing a vital interpretation of Handel’s late opera Imeneo, given in its serenade style 1742 Dublin version. 

If, by this date, the London public was tiring of the Italian opera in which Handel had been excelling for decades, and the composer was now turning both to the oratorio and in the direction of the galant style, he was still able to call upon divos and divas of the quality of La Francesina and Giovanni Battista Andreoni to perform his music. Though not a success in its Lincoln’s Inn Fields staging in London, Imeneo was performed by Handel as his only Italian work during his season in Dublin (which also saw the first performance of Messiah), complete with additional arias to add to those praised in 1740 and a pruning of the libretto (which hadn’t received approval).

The revised story turns on Tirinto (Ann Hallenberg in Biondi’s modern-day production, as performed at the Handel Festival in Halle) pining for his beloved and kidnapped Rosmene (Monica Piccinini). Her liberation by Imeneo (Magnus Staveland) leads to Rosmene being required to decide which of the two Athenians to wed. Hymen – as Handel’s work was known in Dublin – was the god of marriage, and so, will love overcome duty and reason or not? Fabio Biondi, directing from the violin, brings all his own experience in both Italian music and music from the eighteenth century in delivering a stunning vindication of an unfairly neglected Handel opera. (GLOSSA)