CARO DARDO

SOPRANOS AND CASTRATI IN FARINELLI'S LONDON

• OLALLA ALEMÁN - XAVIER SABATA - LA TEMPESTAD | SILVIA MÁRQUEZ CHULILLA, harpsichord and direction

• MÚSICA ANTIGUA ARANJUEZ 006 2007 | DL M-14948-2007

Under the title of Caro dardo we gather here music that alludes to the baroque commonplace of love and death, Eros and Thanatos: the arrow of love lacerates the soul with its sweet wound and makes it die in the arms of the beloved. This is a recording made in June 2006 in the Real Palacio de Aranjuez, the very place where the prodigious voice of the castrato Farinelli soothed the melancholy of the first Spanish Bourbon.

The void in English musical life after the death of Henry Purcell was filled by Italian opera, which flooded the English stage during the first half of the eighteenth century. High voices almost completely dominated baroque opera, so the most important male roles were usually entrusted to castrati and female sopranos, who vied with one another in trills, warbles and coloraturas.

Domenico Scarlatti (1685 – 1757)

01. Narcissus Dio d'amor (duetto)

02. Narcissus Caro Dardo

Thomas Roseingrave (1688 – 1776)

03. Narcissus Rivolgo il passo altrove (duetto)

Niccola Porpora (1686 – 1768)

04. Polifemo Senti il fato

Johann Adolf Hasse (1699 – 1783)

05. Artaxerxes Pallido il sole

Thomas Arne (1710 – 1778) Concierto para clave nº 5 en Sol menor

06. Largo

07. Allegro con spirito

08. Adagio

09. Vivace

Francesco Maria Veracini (1690 – 1768)

10. Adriano Prendi o Cara (duetto)

Georg Friedrich Haendel (1685 – 1759)

11. Rodelinda Ombre, piante

12. Rodelinda Io t’abbraccio (duetto)

13. Rodelinda Vivi tiranno

14. Faramondo Vado e vivo (duetto)

"The instrumental accompaniments are splendid in their depth, marked on the one hand by two agile and elegant violins and on the other by a rounded, incisive continuo, and in their unflagging vitality and their suitability to the expressive meaning of the arias."

Pablo J. Vayón | DIARO DE SEVILLA

"Márquez gives Arne's Concierto para clave an almost chamber-like character, also playing its cadenzas with agility and good taste."

Pablo J. Vayón | DIARO DE SEVILLA

"Two of the most important Spanish voices in this baroque repertoire –Olalla Alemán and Xavier Sabata– star in this recital, in which La Tempestad also interleaves a beautiful concerto by Thomas Arne that demonstrates the interpretative excellence of an absolutely indispensable ensemble."

CD Best of the Month | REVISTA VARIACIONES

"It is surprising how such a small instrumental ensemble, barely seven players, is able to achieve a full, decidedly orchestral sound texture."

Antonio Díaz Bautista | LA VERDAD

"Listening to this recording, one understands the aim of not remaining with the score, but of captivating, awakening, inciting, moving and stirring, making the listener feel «quell'affano che da morte, e non ucide», as one of the Handelian arias says."

Antonio Díaz Bautista | LA VERDAD

"The works by Handel, Hasse, Scarlatti and Porpora are heard in impeccably played and passionately expressive performances."

Pablo J. Vayón | DIARO DE SEVILLA

Human nature is often incomprehensible and tastes are arbitrary. Who would disagree that “no man is a prophet in his own country”? In every country, at one time or another, there has been a situation in which anything coming from abroad was better than what was native. After the death of H. Purcell (an honourable exception to what has been said) in 1695, English composers such as Th. Clayton encouraged the appearance of Italian opera on the English stage, already in the early years of the eighteenth century, importing music and musicians after their travels. Composers such as Bononcini and castrati such as Valentino and Nicolino reaped considerable successes in the first years of the century. The criticism of amateurs and professionals alike (Ch. Burney found nothing to praise in the English music of his century) helped ensure that by around 1720 London theatres were supplied for the most part with Italian music and singers. “Caro dardo” thus seems an apt title for an album that represents, in Italian (one had to choose a language, after all), duality, ambiguity, opposition, rivalry: “beloved dart” implies the paradox of loving something that hurts, that pains and yet is longed for.

The musical ties between England and Italy were intense: to continue along the path of dialectic, it is said (although the event is recounted only in Handel's biography published by Mainwaring in 1760) that around 1708 or 1709 D. Scarlatti and G.F. Handel faced each other in Rome in a friendly keyboard contest, in which Handel emerged victorious on the organ, while Scarlatti did so on the harpsichord. But it is at the weekly concerts organised by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni that D. SCARLATTI met virtuosos and composers such as Corelli and Thomas Roseingrave, who played a decisive role in spreading Scarlatti's music throughout England and Ireland. This is how we find on the London stage of 1720 his opera Narcissus, in reality a revised version of Amor d’un ombra e gelosia d’un aura (Rome, 1714), with several musical numbers composed by Roseingrave himself, and presumably performed under the direction of Handel, then director of the Royal Academy of Music. In the selection published by I. Walsh and I. Hare (“Songs in the New Opera call’d Narcissus as they are perform’d at the King’s Theatre for the Royal Academy (…) with the additional songs composed by Mr. Roseingrave.”) appear Dio d’amor and Caro dardo: both introduce the theme of the arrow that wounds the character with love, plunged from that moment into a bittersweet mixture of love and pain, kisses and blood. Far from that state of intoxication, Th. ROSEINGRAVE plays with a double artifice in Rivolgo il passo altrove: on the one hand, Narcisso oscillates between resolve and weakness, impetuosity and fragility, moods rendered in a highly descriptive way in the music; on the other, the replies of Ecco, which repeat the last part of Narcisso's words, are chosen so that in the mouth of one or the other they have different meanings: altrove/ ove? (elsewhere/ where?); udirò/ dirò (I shall hear/ I shall say); m’innamoro/ moro (I fall in love/ I die); fuggo della foresta/ resta (I flee the forest/ stay)… The fact that the sopranos who premiered Narcissus were “Sig.ra Durastanti and Mrs. A. Robinson” shows that in 1720 there was still some hope for English singers (even though Mrs. Robinson spoke Italian fluently and never sang in English operas). From then on the outlook darkened with the arrival of virtuosos such as the castrato Senesino or the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni.

For centuries the figure of the castrati was a source of triumphs and envy, quarrels and insults, fanaticism and admiration. For a time, owing to the ban on women singing in churches and theatres, talented boys were selected for castration, in order to prevent the breaking of the voice and preserve their extraordinary range. By virtue of the operation to which they had been subjected, on the English stage of the 1720s and 1730s the agility and power of famous castrati such as Carlo Broschi “Farinelli”, Senesino, Caffarelli and Bernacchi, among others, aroused frenzy among the public and feuds among the sopranos of the day (the Cuzzoni or the Bordoni, “The Rival Queens”), among the fashionable houses (King’s Theatre, Covent Garden), among the producers, the companies (la Academia, la Ópera de la Nobleza) and even the composers (Handel, Porpora, Hasse) who based their success, and part of the expressive resources of their operas, on the quality of these voices. The struggle for primacy went beyond the musical sphere: off stage, the charisma and affability of Farinelli were set against the haughtiness and insolence of Senesino; or English was defended against the Italian that Handel used with increasing fondness. However, given how few people spoke it, the argument would not have taken hold had it not been for the programmes bought at the entrance of the theatres, which gave the English translation and the cast.

In this period the conventions of Italian opera became established in London just as in other countries. The events of the story took place during long recitatives, and the arias served as a prolonged expression of feelings that had been left hanging at the end of these recitatives. The script or libretto had to be complex enough to allow the principal characters to sing several arias showing diverse emotions, and it was this that really delighted the audience. Even the number of arias each character sang was fixed according to their status. In the words of the Venetian dramatist and librettist Goldoni:

The three principal characters of the drama must sing five arias each; (…) The author of the words must provide the musician with different shades that form the chiaroscuro of the music (…). He must distribute with equal care the arias of bravura, those of action, the lesser ones, and the minuets and rondos.

We offer, then, following Goldoni's advice, an aria of bravura to each of our singers, thus setting the stage for a duel. Both are written in E flat, a key reserved for moments of sublime seriousness, sombre thoughts, love unto death (human or divine… In the case of N. PORPORA, a Neapolitan like D. Scarlatti, his mastery in setting the Italian language to music was acknowledged in his day, and in 1734, after working in cities such as Naples, Rome, Venice, Dresden and Vienna, he was invited to form an opera company (la Ópera de la Nobleza) to rival Handel's, whose cast included the best Italian singers of the moment. His version of Polifemo, based on the story of the nymph Galatea, her love for Acis and the love of the Cyclops Polyphemus for her (with a libretto by Paolo Rolli), premiered at the King’s Theatre in February 1735, with the Cuzzoni, Senesino, Farinelli (for whom Porpora wrote the role of Acis, protagonist of Senti il Fato), Sgra. Bertolli, Sgra. Segatti and Sgr. Montagnana. The complete opera is a display of virtuosity for the principal characters. The custom was to give the role of the hero to a castrato, but it was not unusual to hear these roles sung by female sopranos, an option we have preferred on this occasion. For his part, J.A. HASSE left his work as a tenor at the Ópera de Hamburgo to travel to Italy, where he lived for three years in Venice, Bologna, Florence and Rome, before settling in Naples in 1724. There he studied with Porpora and A. Scarlatti. Farinelli, also a pupil of Porpora, sang his first compositions, after which Hasse received a ceaseless stream of commissions. Artaxerxes, premiered in Venice in 1730, opened the door to Europe and to the court of Dresden, which allowed him to marry the Bordoni, a soprano already famous throughout Europe and, of course, on the London stage. This, together with Porpora's direction of the Ópera de la Nobleza, made possible the performance of Artaxerses in London in the 1734-35 season, in which both Farinelli and the Cuzzoni repeated their roles. Senesino was the new castrato (after the death of Nicolini in 1732) for Pallido il Sole: the writing, the text intensified with daring chords and the key of E flat over a constant murmur of semiquavers in the violins must have produced a genuine shiver in the audience. Like many arias of the period, it was written in Da Capo form, which allowed the singers of the day (and ours) to offer difficult ornamentation with which the audience eagerly awaited the transformation of the original vocal line (despite the recommendations of moderation from P.F. Tosi, a retired castrato, in his treatise on singing). Disseminated once again in a collection by the publisher J. Walsh, Pallido il Sole became one of the most famous arias subsequently sung by Farinelli, although it was not written for him.

Half an hour before the curtain rose, the orchestra began to entertain the audience with music intended for that purpose. Likewise there were pieces for the intervals and for the end. From the 1730s onwards this music was advertised in the newspapers, and the concerti grossi of Geminiani, Corelli or Handel were performed so often that everyone knew them. Sometimes concertos performed by famous soloists or virtuosos were advertised, which served as an attraction. By way of interval music, and as a rest for the singers, we present on this album the Concerto nº 5 by Th. ARNE. The Public Advertiser of 5 February 1751 announced a new concerto “composed by Mr. Arne and performed by Master Arne”. The performer, and attraction at the same time, was Th. Arne's son Michael, a precocious virtuoso. Although they were not published in the composer's lifetime (despite the original plan to publish them by subscription), the title of the parts, published in 1793, offers the possibility of playing his six concertos on the organ, the harpsichord or the fortepiano. The brilliant figuration and ornamentation of no. 5 invite performance on the harpsichord, while the hand-crossings, certain harmonic turns and the writing of the last movement make it inevitable to think of Scarlatti's influence. In our version we have adapted the instrumentation to the ensemble (traverso instead of oboes): the orchestral roster of Covent Garden shows that, as in many European orchestras of the period, one and the same musician alternated between flute and oboe.

The success of the musical side of a performance depended not only on the composer directing from the harpsichord, but on the presence of a good concertino at the head of the orchestra (and fully in charge in the composer's absence). It is in that post that we find F. M. VERACINI in London as early as 1714. Twenty years later he would return as a composer of operas. Prendi o Cara is one of the arias published by Walsh, selected from the opera Adriano, premiered in 1735, in whose cast we again see Sig.r Senesino and Sig.ra Bertolli (the protagonists of this duetto), alongside Farinelli and the Cuzzoni. On the title page of the edition appears the following notice: “Note. Where these arias are sold may also be found Apollo’s Feast in four volumes, containing the favourite songs of all Mr. Handel's operas”. Needless to say, by that time the fame of G.F. HANDEL far surpassed that of his contemporaries, and the publishers lost no opportunity to profit from it. The vocal lines and accompaniments of Handel's arias heightened the emotional depth of the conventional texts and situations, and his music was conceived in a dramatic and even descriptive manner. Rodelinda was the third masterpiece produced by Handel in less than a year. Premiered in 1725, it represents one of the high points of his career, and was an immediate success. Ombre, piante reflects the feeling of grief and anguish before the husband's tomb, accentuated by the appoggiaturas and suspensions in the voice, and by the echo of the flute like a lament. Io t’abbraccio shows the pain of the separation between Rodelinda (the Cuzzoni) and Bertarido (Senesino), and Vivi tiranno represents triumph over the enemy and the greatness of sparing him. If the album began with Cupid's arrow and left us with storm clouds and threats before the interlude, Vado e vivo (Faramondo, 1738) serves as a final flourish and opens a shaft of light after these sombre arias.

The arias that make up the programme span the period between 1720 (Farinelli's first public appearance) and 1738 (after his withdrawal from the London theatres, and after achieving fame on every European stage), and form a pasticcio (a method very much in vogue in performances of the second half of the eighteenth century) that represents what London audiences had accepted as a new style of opera: although it had its detractors, Italian opera, sung entirely and with the emphasis on the arias and the quality of the singers, had prevailed over the kind that only thirty years earlier, with spoken dialogue, masques, dances and stage effects, had delighted the English… in their own language.

Silvia Márquez Chulilla