Vivaldi Ercole sul Termodante
Soloists
Europa Galante
Fabio Biondi
As far as I know I have never heard a single note from any of Vivaldi’s operas. Until recently they were more or less unknown territory but many of them have now been recorded.
I didn’t have high expectation of this piece. I had in my head the cliche that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 600 times and thought that it might apply also to his operas. In other words we were going to get lots of painting by numbers as Vivaldi turned the handle on his compositional machine.
To start with my fears seemed justified because I found the first few numbers very routine and uninspired, but the piece grew on me. Vivaldi introduced some interesting harmonic diversions here and there and there was quite a few few places where there were some unexpected rhythms. I felt that the slower and more lyrical music worked better than the faster sections. He has a real flair for the pastoral idiom whereas I thought that some of the faster, more extrovert music was way over the top - the singers, particularly the tenor., really struggled with some of it.
Stylistically the nearest point of reference to this music is probably the operas of Handel, but I don’t think that this is the same league. Pleasant at parts of it certainly it didn’t really make the impact that Handel at his best really can achieve. Handel is next in this project so a side-by-side comparison will be interesting.
This is the 50th opera in this project. When I started I wasn’t sure how how I was going to pace things but I have managed to get half way after only 4 months. So at this rate I might well get to something closer to 150 operas. Still I won’t set a target and I’ll see what happens - I’m not going to run short of composers or operas.
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