Ensemble 1700 / Dorothee Oberlinger GIOVANNI BATTISTA BONONCINI Polifemo

POLIFEMO

Roberta Invernizzi / Laboratorio '600 ALESSANDRO DELLA CIAIA Lamentationi

A new opportunity to hear the glorious virtuosity of Roberta Invernizzi comes with this Lamentationi, where the soprano is joined by Franco Pavan’s Laboratorio ’600 in an intimate and intense Passiontide score from mid seventeenth-century Siena: Alessandro Della Ciaia’s set of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Convents throughout Siena at the time boasted nuns of considerable musical talents, both in singing and in playing instruments such as the organ, lute and theorbo, and it is undoubtedly for one such convent that the nobleman Della Ciaia wrote his music for the Holy Weeks matins services. His Lamentations are scored for a solo soprano possessed of a very wide range and capable of meeting his demanding technical effects.

Roberta Invernizzi is the ideal modern-day singer to rise to such spiritual music, and to respond to the text and its description of the grief over the fall of the city of Jerusalem and the terrible fate of its people.

Alessandro Della Ciaia was himself a noted player of the archlute, and his instrumental facility is evident across the lamentations, here performed by harp, archlute, organ and theorbo. Franco Pavan has chosen to intersperse the nine lamentations with toccatas by Michelagnolo Galilei, Claudio Saracini and Vincenzo Bernia as well as Pavan’s own reworking of an appropriate motet by Della Ciaia.

Roberta Invernizzi / Auser Musici / Carlo Ipata THE GASPARINI ALBUM

The latest striking release from soprano Roberta Invernizzi acts as a lightning conductor for this new vocal extravaganza from Glossa devoted to the Italian Baroque composer Francesco Gasparini. Invernizzi finds herself very much home both in the music – which was originally first performed around the turn of the eighteenth century and which provided “influences” for Handel, who was Gasparini’s junior by some 20 years – but also, so noticeably, with the words: librettos from the likes of Zeno, Piovene or Salvi find this singer exercising her customary intelligence.

Carlo Ipata, directing his ensemble Auser Musici, combines his natural and obvious flair for Italian and music of the time – he has also recorded the opera Il Bajazet for Glossa – with the painstaking demands of the research required to identify brilliant arias from slumbering the various shades of neglect. Gasparini wrote some sixty operas, as well as oratorios and many cantatas. For Invernizzi Ipata has crafted a beguiling selection from this abundance of music which proved so successful in both princely soirées in Rome and public theatres in Venice. Arias come from operas such as Il Roderigo and Amleto and oratorios such as L’oracolo del Fato and Atalia. As well as the cantata, Andate o miei sospiri, composed by Gasparini as part of a challenge undertaken jointly with Alessandro Scarlatti, Ipata and Auser Musici have added an attractive flute concerto written during his time as a teacher at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà. (Glossa)

Roberta Invernizzi / Blandine Staskiewicz / Lisandro Abadie / La Risonanza / Fabio Bonizzoni HANDEL Aci, Galatea e Polifemo

Fabio Bonizzoni returns with his long-awaited new recording of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo which serves both as a pendant for his award-winning series of Handel Cantatas for Glossa and as a further exploration from him into the serenata form (which has already brought forward gems from Vivaldi and Alessandro Scarlatti). 

Who better to team up once again with Bonizzoni – and performing the role of the luckless shepherd Aci – than that scintillating soprano Roberta Invernizzi, whose captivating contributions to the Handel series from La Risonanza as well as her just-released Neapolitan Baroque music travels with Antonio Florio in I Viaggi di Faustina have been drawing powerful critical plaudits and inciting listener joy in equal measure. Joining Roberta Invernizzi for the dramatic energy called upon in Handel’s virtuosic and ebullient score, written for a 1708 wedding whilst he was in Naples (Carlo Vitali sets the scene in his enjoyably discursive booklet essay) are the Argentinean bass Lisandro Abadie – summoned to demonstrate an awe- inspiring range that well becomes the monstrous nature of Polifemo – and French mezzo Blandine Staskiewicz, admirably suited to portray Galatea’s plaintive charms. 

Not least among the attractions of this new Glossa release are the demands placed by the young Handel on the instrumental forces at his disposal and here triumphantly delivered by a La Risonanza in exuberant form, in a recording made in Saint- Michel en Thiérache in France. (GLOSSA)

Capella de'Turchini / Antonio Florio CAVALLI Statira

Though it has its flaws, this is a hugely important issue that adds immeasurably to our understanding of Pietro Francesco Cavalli, the dominant Italian opera composer of the second half of the 17th century. His music fell out of fashion after his death, and its rediscovery, which began with Glyndebourne's productions of L'Ormindo and La Calisto in the 1960s, has been a slow process. This recording of Statira, first performed in Venice in 1656, cannot help but change our views of his output as a whole, since it reveals a dark side to Cavalli hitherto ignored.

It begins in familiar territory. The plot is rooted in one of those complex, cross-dressing tangles - quintessentially Cavalli - complete with an emphasis on bisexuality as fundamental to human nature, something that made the composer unperformable for centuries. Statira, daughter of King Darius of Persia, is in love with Cloridaspe, king of Arabia. There are, of course, complications. Usimano, an Egyptian prince, is also besotted with Statira; in order to pursue her, he has disguised himself as a woman and is now employed as her lady-in-waiting. "Ermosilla", as he calls himself, attracts men like a magnet, including Cloridaspe's brutal sidekick Nicarco and his manservant Vaffrino.

Anyone expecting this situation to resolve itself serenely after the fashion of Calisto, however, is in for a shock, for the opera's subject is actually the relationship between sex and war. The men are members of a military alliance that is in the process of flattening Armenia. whether it holds or not depends on the shifting sexual allegiances back home. Once Usimano's guise has been penetrated, Statira becomes a bargaining tool between themen, who demand her favours in exchange for military service to her father. A conventionally happy ending doesn't alleviate the resultant nastiness.

Stylistically, the score blends familiar Cavalli with startlingly new elements. Cloridaspe and Usimano are both played by women, which means there are plenty of his sexy trademark duets for twining female voices. Instead of advancing the action with extended recitative dialogues as in La Calisto, however, Statira often proceeds by way of successive monologues that swing from recitative to arioso and back. As Statira becomes a pawn in a man's world, her growing anguish is mirrored in arias of ever-increasing size and difficulty. Cavalli is frequently cited as the link between Monteverdi and Handel; his pivotal nature has never been more apparent than here.

Conducting his own Naples-based period band, the Cappella de' Turchini, Antonio Florio's performance has great clout. Cavalli never wrote out the orchestration in full - in the 17th century, much of it would have been improvised in performance - and this performing edition is Florio's own. It's very stark, with dry strings and sparsely deployed woodwind and brass, far removed from the smoothness of Raymond Leppard's editions or the jazzy flamboyance of René Jacobs.

The singing, however, is uneven. Clarity of diction sometimes takes precedence over beauty of line. Dionisia di Vico's Cloridaspe reveals some ungainly register breaks, and Giuseppe Naviglio's Nicarco isn't quite dangerous enough. On the plus side, however, there's Rosario Totaro's funny, cynical Vaffrino, Maria Ercolano's complex, vibrant Usimano and, above all, Roberta Invernizzi's Statira, miraculously fusing sound with sense in even the most taxing bravura passages. This is a restoration of a lost masterpiece by one of opera's greats, and you need to hear it. (Tim Ashley / The Guardian)

Roberta Invernizzi / Sonia Prina / Ensemble Claudiana / Luca Pianca AMORE E MORTE DELL'AMORE

An album of Baroque love duets seems to tumble off the presses every other month. Not that I’m complaining when the results are as good as this. The programme is unclichéd, ranging from Monteverdi’s Seventh and Eighth Books of Madrigals, via little-known pieces by Benedetto Marcello, Lotti and Durante, to two chamber cantatas composed by the young Handel immediately after his triumphant Italian sojourn. And in Roberta Invernizzi and Sonia Prina, Naïve have netted the two most exciting Italian Baroque specialists of their generation.
Native speakers have a head start, of course, in Monteverdi’s humanist-inspired declamatory recitative. With their pure, almost instrumental timbres, musical intelligence and acute yet unexaggerated feeling for verbal sound and sense, Invernizzi and Prina make well-nigh ideal partners. Their precision and blend are uncanny. In the languidly melancholic ‘Interrotte speranze’ they point the harmonic clashes and shape the cadences with exquisite taste, using vibrato discreetly and tellingly. ‘Mentre vaga angioletta’, a hymn to the spirit of music, provokes riots of giddy yet perfectly controlled coloratura. Their voices then entwine in hushed ecstasy in the final duet from L’incoronazione di Poppea, long known not to be by Monteverdi – though there’s no whisper of this in the inadequate booklet-note, the one serious blot on the whole production.
Moving forward a century, soprano and contralto are no less intense in the masochistic adoration of Lotti’s Giuramento amoroso and Durante’s darkly brooding Son io barbara donna. They spar gleefully with each other in the two Handel cantatas. Throughout the disc the continuo battery of Ensemble Claudiana provides colourful support, while violinist Riccardo Minasi relishes both the inwardness and percussive boldness of a rare sonata by Domenico Scarlatti. But the disc belongs to Invernizzi and Prina, who aptly cap a feast of glorious Baroque singing with volleys of delighted Handelian virtuosity. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)

Roberta Invernizzi / Thomas E. Bauer / Furio Zanasi / La Risonanza / Fabio Bonizzoni HANDEL Apollo e Dafne

For the final volume in Fabio Bonizzoni’s survey of cantatas written by Georg Friedrich Handel during his stay in Italy, the background scenery moves – like a reflection of the Grand Tour – from Rome to Naples; probably the troubled times in a Rome besieged by Imperial troops during the War of the Spanish Succession may have encouraged the young, itinerant Saxon musician to consider that heading down south was safer and more conducive for his overall career prospects.

It was a time when Handel was conceiving the three highly-charged cantatas to be heard on this disc and he would have been aware that Naples was blest with a bass singer, Domenico Antonio Manna, possessed of a prodigious vocal range, encompassing two octaves and a fifth. And maybe, Handel wrote two of the pieces performed on this disc – Apollo e Dafne and Cuopre tal volta il cielo – with Manna in mind, even if the former cantata was perhaps completed once Handel later had reached Hannover.

Carlo Vitali’s engaging booklet essay colourfully helps to summon up early 18th century Neapolitan culture and Handel’s potential place within it.

Joining Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza for these modern-day realizations of the Baroque Italian musical world experienced by Handel are Furio Zanasi and Thomas Bauer for the bass roles, as well as soprano Roberta Invernizzi, an integral feature of this revelatory and much-praised Handel series since its inception. (GLOSSA)

Roberta Invernizzi / Yetzabel Arias Fernández / Romina Basso / La Risonanza / Fabio Bonizzoni HANDEL Olinto pastore

The Accademia degli Arcadi - that thought-provoking and ideas-creating literary circle set up by a group of poets, composers, aristocrats and churchmen, which championed a return to classical (and pastoral) ideals and one of whose keenest members was the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, Handel’s patron in Rome - forms the aesthetic background for this sixth and penultimate release in the series of Italian cantatas by the Saxon composer which Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza are making for Glossa. In an engrossing essay written by Carlo Vitali (which additionally benefits from the counsels of Michael Talbot), the listener/reader is introduced to the social and political references contained within the pastoral texts of Olinto, pastore arcade, Duello amoroso and Alpestre monte, the three Handel cantatas which make up this CD. For this disc Bonizzoni turns again to three of his regular singers (the sopranos Roberta Invernizzi and Yetzabel Arias Fernández and the mezzo soprano Romina Basso) as well as counting upon the services of his exceptional first violinist, the young Swiss Leila Schayegh, an up-and-coming player whose talent is beginning to be an open secret... The spring of 2010 is anticipated as seeing the conclusion of this Handel collection, the grand finale being that marvellous cantata Apollo e Dafne. (GLOSSA)

Roberta Invernizzi / Yetzabel Arias Fernández / Romina Basso / La Risonanza / Fabio Bonizzoni HANDEL Clori, Tirsi e Fileno

In May 1707 George Frideric Handel entered into the service of the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, and under his protection, embarked upon a tremendous career. As well as making a name for himself as a spectacular virtuoso on the harpsichord and organ, through his plentiful concerts in the Roman academies, Handel lost no time in also becoming a highly sought-after composer through his felicitous and apparently inexhaustible inspiration. In addition to a significant number of cantatas for solo voice and basso continuo, Handel also involved himself in composing cantatas for larger numbers of voices, combining these with a large supporting orchestral group.

The score of Clori, Tirsi e Fileno is certainly a complex one, as much for its dramatic plotline as for its individually-chosen musical options: the result is a genuine opera in miniature, equipped with real refinement and lightness. Consequently, Clori, Tirsi e Fileno turns - even more so than with other Italian cantata works by the caro Sassone - into an authentic laboratory in which Handel experiments with the most diverse musical and dramatic forms, obtaining by this method a capacity to elaborate that special language which was to locate it firmly within the glories of the theatre, from the past and the present. (GLOSSA)

Roberta Invernizzi / Emanuela Galli / Fabio Bonizzoni / La Risonanza HANDEL Le Cantate per il Marchese Ruspoli

In the autumn of last year Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza embarked on a journey taking a fresh look – musicologically as well as musically – at the chamber cantatas to Italian texts and with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy. Where the first release on Glossa focused on works associated with Cardinal Pamphili in Rome, this new recording contains pieces – including the dramatic cantata Armida abbandonata and Handel’s ‘own’ Hunt Cantata – originating in the establishment of the Marquis Ruspoli and written for sopranos such as Margherita Durastante and Vittoria Tarquini.

Here it is the Milanese soprano Emanuela Galli who takes centre stage (and she also has taken on the role of Eurydice in Glossa’s recent recording of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo directed by Claudio Cavina). Roberta Invernizzi returns, joining forces with Galli, for Diana cacciatrice. Making use of recent research the booklet notes – written on this occasion by Karl Boehmer – help to illuminate for us Handel’s sojourn in Italy in 1707 and the origins of the five cantatas recorded here. (GLOSSA)

Roberta Invernizzi / La Risonanza / Fabio Bonizzoni HANDEL Le Cantate per il Cardinal Pamphili

The chamber cantata flourished in Italy as a counterpart to public opera and oratorio, cultivated by aristocratic patrons for their personal enjoyment. Perhaps because of its essentially private origins, this pervasive Baroque form remains little known today. During his years in Italy (1706-1710), George Frideric Handel composed nearly 100 cantatas for a series of important patrons, but they have tended to be passed over in favour of his larger operas, oratorios, concertos and orchestral suites. The plan of La Risonanza to perform and record all of the cantatas with instrumental accompaniment (about one-third of the total) is therefore of signal importance for all music lovers, as it will bring this extraordinarily beautiful music once again to life (2006-2009).

This first disc presents four remarkable cantatas from early in Handel’s Italian period: Il delirio amoroso, Tra le fiamme, Figlio d’alte speranze and Pensieri notturni di Filli. Given the intensity, maturity and beauty of the cantatas, it is no surprise that Handel found them useful throughout his life, but now it is finally possible to bring these remarkable works out of Handel’s workroom and give them their own long-overdue hearing. (GLOSSA)

Roberta Invernizzi / Silvia Frigato / Thomas Bauer / La Risonanza / Fabio Bonizzoni G.F. HAENDEL Duetti e Terzetti italiani

Fabio Bonizzoni returns with a further Glossa release dedicated to the chamber vocal output of Georg Friedrich Handel: here, a second volume of duets (and trios), which features the vocal talents of Roberta Invernizzi, Silvia Frigato, Thomas Bauer and Krystian Adam.

Whilst Handel wrote these small-scale vocal works across his career, this new selection focuses on that astonishingly fertile brief stay that the young Saxon made in Italy from 1707-09 (when he also produced many of the cantatas which Bonizzoni has recorded to great critical success for Glossa). These sensual duets and trios are imbued with Handel’s discovery of Italian – especially the Arcadian – culture, which included him hearing and understanding the music of Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. How quickly and successfully Handel developed the chamber duet form is discussed in another of Stefano Russomanno’s detailed explorations of Handel’s music in the booklet essay.

Much of the music for these duets and trios on this recording is scored for soprano and bass singers and Roberta Invernizzi, in particular, is afforded another opportunity to demonstrate her magical reaction to Handel’s responsiveness to the Italian language. Not to be outdone in this respect are also the other vocal solists and of course the experienced continuo team from La Risonanza: Caterina Dell’Angello (cello), Evangelina Mascardi (theorbo) and Fabio Bonizzoni himself (harpsichord). (GLOSSA)

Duetti e Terzetti italiani. pdf

Roberta Invernizzi / I Turchini / Antonio Florio I VIAGGI DI FAUSTINA

I Viaggi di Faustina is part of a series from Spain's Glossa label, with each album examining the legacy of a singer from the 18th century, re-creating the repertory sung and even the sound of the voice insofar as such a thing is possible. The title I Viaggi di Faustina refers to Faustina Bordoni, the Neapolitan singer who became famous for her onstage brawl with her rival Francesca Cuzzoni, shrewdly egged on by Handel's promoters in London. But her career was centered on Naples, where she married German-born composer Johann Adolf Hasse; the "viaggi" here are trips both to and from Naples, and the music consists of excerpts from operas she is known to have sung. A similar album by American mezzo soprano Vivica Genaux brings Handel into the mix, but Italian mezzo Roberta Invernizzi sticks with Italian composers, and the scale of the music, more delicate than fiery, is suited to her voice. The music blooms into high notes only occasionally, but it demands agility and finesse, according well with contemporary descriptions of Bordoni's own voice. And Invernizzi is sympathetic to the music, which includes no killer Handelian tunes but has plenty of charm. The program is mostly by three composers, two known only to Baroque and Classical opera enthusiasts, Leonardo Vinci and Nicola Porpora (the latter Haydn's teacher), and one Neapolitan local unknown to all but serious specialists, Francesco Mancini. The fact that the Mancini pieces are perhaps the most charming of all will recommend this album automatically to anyone with an interest in the period. It all comes together in a piece like "Canta e de caro usignolo," from Mancini's opera Traiano, a night piece that shows off the smooth sound of the Baroque orchestra I Turchini under Antonio Florio to great advantage. A worthwhile addition to any library of Baroque opera and a pleasant foretaste of delights to come in Glossa's series. (James Manheim)

Roberta Invernizzi / Accademia Hermans / Fabio Ciofini QUEENS

A disc of Handel opera arias from Roberta Invernizzi is remarkable in its own right because it breaks new ground for the Milanese soprano. True, she has taken part in complete operas on disc as on stage, and has recorded plenty of arias by other composers of the time such as Vivaldi, Leo, Porpora, Feo or Mancini (Arias for Domenico Gizzi and I Viaggi di Faustina being two recent albums). This new release from Glossa, however, sees Invernizzi reflecting Handel’s special brand of emotional investigation and making her selection from the many regal characters which pepper Handel’s operas – Cleopatra, Berenice, Arianna and Alcina, among them – and their ardent, affecting, distraught and stately feelings. 

These are choppy waters through which Roberta Invernizzi sails with unquestionable skill: complete control of her native language and dominance of Handel’s stylistic demands in canto espressivo and canto d’agilità – all being allied to her lustrous vocal tones. She finds responsive and sympathetic accompaniment from Fabio Ciofini and his Accademia Hermans, which works extensively in the Perugian Teatro Cucinelli in Solomeo. 

Invernizzi’s majestic sweep of Handelian queens also takes us through a chequered period in the composer’s career, when he led the two Royal Academies of Music in the 1720s and 1730s. At this time, he was writing for magnificent and tempestuous divas such as Francesca Cuzzoni and Anna Maria Strada del Pò – a selection of their roles is to be heard on this recording. (Glossa Music)

Roberta Invernizzi / Sonia Prina / Ensemble Claudiana / Luca Pianca AMORE E MORTE DELL'AMORE

The duet madrigal, chamber cantata, or aria was a prime form of the early Baroque, ready-made for a noble family that wished to display its house singers and even draw from them a little bit of competition. There are a number of albums in the genre on the market, but Amore e morte dell'amore (Love and the Death of Love), from reigning Baroque soprano queen Roberta Invernizzi and newer contralto talent Sonia Prina, stands out from the crowd. First there are the rich voices of the singers themselves, who could sing a random web search page and make it sound good, and their razor-sharp coordination. Second is the program, which traverses the entire 17th century and moves into the 18th, holding everything together thematically and largely avoiding well-known numbers (other than the finale duet from Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea), touching on some unusual mid-century finds by Antonio Lotti and Francesco Durante, with a well-placed ensemble treatment of a Domenico Scarlatti sonata as an interlude. That piece shows off the talents of the Ensemble Claudiana, new faces on the historical-performance scene. Above all these individual factors is their coherence into an overall package. Invernizzi and Prina get the intimate chamber quality of most of this music, its natural habitat of a music room with a group of connoisseurs who were ready to listen closely. They are virtuosic, lithe, and playful, even when they approach a serious text. Naïve supports them beautifully with studio sound. Highly recommended. (James Manheim)

Roberta Invernizzi / Salvo Vitale / Giulio Prandi / Ghislieri Choir & Consort DAVIDE PEREZ Mattutino de' Morti

There are some interpreters’ albums in which a certain vision stirs our admiration. There are complete works , famous composers , different generations,  schools and conceptions that outline the landmark  of certain  parts of  this kind of literature. It is argued whether the musician was good or not. It is then compared with other versions. Or, as it is the case of this album, Davide Perez, it gets discovered – a name, a work, an age – of transition in this case, as the Italian born in Naples, in Pergolesi’s generation, was part of a particular longevity line, by dying in Lisbon in the year when Mozart composed  Symphony no. 31, Paris.

An album released in 2014 – Mattutino de' Morti by Davide Perez, in a fundamental interpretation – Ghislieri Choir and Consort, conducted by Giulio Prandi along with the soprano Roberta Invernizzi and the bass Salvo Vitale, as soloists. It is an album through which one of the 18^th  century’ masterpieces is returned to us alongwith this name enlisted in the  gallery of the creators of Opera Seria and sacred music, that is brought back to our attention.

Dedicated to those gone, Mattutinode' Morti is an oratorio for soloists, choir and orchestra – luxuriant, like the royal ceremonies. It symbolizes, even in this case, the ideas of greatness and brilliance; just like other similar pages signed by Davide Perez, it creates a bridge between the Baroque and the Classicism; it brings here the concertato style and some features borrowed from the operatic works. It was kept in the repertory  since 1770, the year of its first appearance, until the end of the 19^th century. After a break longer than a century, it was interpreted in 2013, by the Ghislieri Choir and Consort in France, Italy, Holland and at the "George Enescu" International Festival in Bucharest, during the nightly concerts at the Romanian Athenaeum. (Marina Nedelcu)