Photo credit: Marco Caselli Nirmal Vivaldi’s “Orlando Furioso” is a work that represents baroque opera at its most exciting. Set on Alcina’s magical island, where the weird and wonderful are commonplace, it opens up the possibility for colorful and spectacular stagings with shipwrecks, fantastical beasts, monsters and statues that come to life. There are high mountains, wooded groves, steep cliffs {…}
(Photo: Studio B12 di Gianpaolo Guarneri) The duet “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo,” which brought Teatro Aligheri’s presentation of “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” to its conclusion, was rightly met with enthusiastic applause from the audience. The sensitivity, emotional depth and detail that countertenor Federico Fiorio and soprano Roberta Mameli were able to bring to their singing was breathtaking. Their voices {…}
(Photo: Marco Caselli) In 1739 Vivaldi complained in a letter to his patron Marquis Guido Bentivoglio about the treatment he had suffered from the directors of Ferrara’s Teatro Bonacossi: “My reputation has been scourged…to the extent they are refusing as a second opera ‘Farnace,’ which I have prepared afresh especially for the company according to written agreements… I will not {…}