Reply With QuoteHandel, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708) large scale dramatic Italian cantata. Note the music has nothing at all in common with the more famous English masque, Acis and Galatea.
It is not very often at all that I read you enjoying Baroque, so this CD must be damn good. That cover I repeat, just looks sensational with her in that beautiful dress.Originally Posted by Anne of Green Gables
Handel, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708) large scale dramatic Italian cantata. Note the music has nothing at all in common with the more famous English masque, Acis and Galatea.
If some of you wouldn't know, JDD has recently uploaded two clips from the Drama Queens recording sessions on her YT channel:
Everything just works: Ms DiDonato and the performance under early music specialist Alan Curtis directing his band usually made up of his own students.
Traditional production from 1986 under Adam Fischer with Eva Morton and Placido Domingo. A nice oldie. Major weakness is the sound quality.
Wow at the staging. When directors do weird things to Don Giovanni and other operas in that vein, they claim they wanted to do "something" with it. And as much as I mostly dislike it, it makes SOME sense as the libretto is pretty rich, interesting and you can actually make interpretation, play with it. But when you have opera like Zelmira with libretto struggling not to convey any depth, but simply to make some basic dramatic sense, what is the excuse? You can't interpret such bunch of cliches and banals. So only thing you can do to distract audience from this plain weakness, IMO, is to put Flórez into some super ancient armor, helmet with awesome, huge plume, dress the chorus likewise, fill the stage with lively action... BUT NO let's give them 20th century uniforms, dull, dark stage and try to find out how well can we resemble Gardiner's Les Troyens DVD. Again, what's the excuse for all this miserable crap, except that Rossini Festival can't perhaps afford to fetch super ancient armor, helmet with awesome, huge plume for Flórez, dress the chorus likewise, and hire director that can fill the stage with lively action.
I don't write about the singing, I don't know anything about it.
L'EBREO (Apolloni)
Issakar Simone Alaimo
Leyla Jolanta Omilian
Isabella Natalie Dessay
Adel-Muza Bernard Lombardo
Ferdinando Mario Castagnetti
Choeurs de l'Opera de Montpellier
Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille
Massimo de Bernart
Montpellier
24.7.1990
Quite a lavish and traditional production of Samson et Dalila from the San Francisco Opera in 1981 with a young Domingo and Shirley Verrett. The DVD shows its age but I am not fussed by that at all. I am more insterested in a production that makes sense to me. This DVD is part of three in a box of Domingos. It is probably not my favourite Samson et Dalila version but a fine one when listening to "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix" never fails to move me and is my favourite of all Saint-Saëns' notes.
So when I was rock-metal teenager I went to cheap wine drinking forest party and one geezer handled me a bottle, I drink and quote unflattering remark about wine's quality from XIXth century play and the geezer says that these two words don't fit each other as one is from baroque and the other more recent so I say YET WE ARE MEN OF CURRENT AGE AND ABLE TO DRAW FROM ALL AGES OF THE PAST... and everybody was like WHAT'S THIS TALK WHERE ARE WE as they weren't as highly civilised as the two of us talking.
You may ask what it has to do with this Alcina... not much, except that I recalled this event when listening.
Cool album, bro.
Nice background information. And to top it off to show you are "highly civilised", what did you think of Alcina?
The music of this opera that I really enjoyed and found engaging would require only one disc instead of three that we get. And I disliked the ending. When the sorceress dies, I expect dramatic music, not Irish dance tunes for piccolo and drums.
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