Composer: George Frideric Handel, Niccolò Jommelli, Leonardo Leo, Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi, Henry Purcell
Performer: Joyce DiDonato
Orchestra: Il Pomo d’Oro
Conductor: Maxim Emelyanychev
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Erato
Catalogue: 9029592846
Release: 2016
Size: 1.36 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Handel: Jephtha
01. “Some dire event hangs o’er our heads… Scenes of horror, scenes of woe” (Storgè)
Leo: Andromaca
02. “Prendi quel ferro, o barbaro!” (Andromaca)
Handel: Giulio Cesare in Egitto
03. “Vani sono i lamenti… Svegliatevi nel core” (Sesto)
Purcell: The Indian Queen, Z630
04. “They tell us that you mighty powers above” (Orazia)
Handel: Agrippina
05. “Pensieri, voi mi tormentate” (Agrippina)
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas
06. “Thy hand, Belinda… When I am laid in earth” (Dido)
Handel: Rinaldo
07. “Lascia ch’io pianga” (Almirena)
Purcell: Bonduca or The British Heroine – incidental music, Z574
08. “Oh! Lead me to some peaceful gloom” (Bonvica)
Handel: Rinaldo
09. “Augelletti che cantate” (Almirena)
Jommelli: Attilio Regolo
10. “Sprezza il furor del vento” (Regolo)
Purcell: The Indian Queen, Z630
11. “Why should men quarrel?” (Girl)
Jommelli: Attilio Regolo
12. “Par che di giubilo” (Attilia)
Handel: Susanna, HWV66
13. “Lead me, oh lead me to some cool retreat…. Crystal streams in murmurs flowing” (Susanna)
Monteverdi: Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria
14. “Illustratevi, o cieli” (Penelope)
Handel: Giulio Cesare in Egitto
15. “Da tempeste il legno infranto” (Cleopatra)
“Perhaps my most personal project to date,” is how American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato describes In War and Peace: Harmony through Music. Her ambitions for this collection of arias from Baroque operas are substantial. Surrounded as we are by instability, she hopes it will help us find an answer to a vitally important question: “In the midst of chaos, how do you find peace?”
Her aim is to “steer conversation and discourse … to help all of us find peace in our lives in a dynamic way … As I have tried to convey in this selection of music, the power to bravely tip the scales towards peace lies firmly within every single one of us.”
DiDonato, an opera singer who certainly does not live in an ivory tower, was motivated to assemble the programme after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. She had been planning an exploratory album with an emphasis on rare arias, but in the light of the tragic events she rethought her approach, giving it wider and deeper implications.
In War and Peace: Harmony through Music was recorded with Il Pomo d’Oro under its principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. The programme comprises 15 arias divided into two sections: ‘War’ and ‘Peace’. Both contain music by Purcell and Handel – including, to close ‘War’, Dido’s dignified, but searing lament from Dido and Aeneas and Almirena’s haunting and heartbreaking ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Rinaldo. An excerpt from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse is included in ‘Peace’, which concludes with Cleopatra’s spirited and defiantly optimistic ‘Da tempeste il legno infranto’ from Giulio Cesare.
A further aria from Giulio Cesare is the bonus track for the album; it is Sesto’s touching apostrophe to hope, ‘Cara speme’, which Joyce DiDonato sings unforgettably on a floating whisper of breath.
In her search for peace and harmony, the American singer did not entirely desert her musicological quest, and the album also contains no fewer than three world premiere recordings: a ‘War’ aria from Andromaca by the Neapolitan composer Leonardo Leo (1694-1744), and two ‘Peace’ arias, from the operas Attila and Attilio Regolo, by another Neapolitan, Niccolò Jommelli (1714-1774).
When Baroque opera was at its height, the highly stylised art form was famously described by the English writer Dr Samuel Johnson as “an exotic and irrational entertainment which has always been combated, and always has prevailed”. It is nearly three centuries since he made that judgement, but opera has continued to prevail – by impassioning performers and thrilling and moving audiences: nothing rivals it in giving intense, compelling expression to matters of life, love and death. Over recent decades, opera of the Baroque era has gained a new and vigorous life, with frequent revivals of works by such masters as Handel, Monteverdi, Vivaldi and Purcell, and the rediscovery of operas by composers who had fallen into obscurity.
Fuelled by these arias, Joyce DiDonato is fervently committed the cause of engaging the hearts and minds of music-lovers around the world. As she leads the way forward, long may opera – and peace – prevail.
Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has gained a strong following with novel, even fearless programs, flawlessly executed. The stimulus for In War & Peace was extramusical: DiDonato temporarily shelved a different project in the wake of the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. The concept is ambitious: the booklet includes quotes about finding peace from figures as varied as Patrick Stewart, Riccardo Muti, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and an inmate at New York’s Sing Sing prison. Does it directly connect with DiDonato’s program of Baroque arias? Listeners will have to decide for themselves, but the good news is that the program stands on its own. War and peace are among the most common themes in Baroque opera, but DiDonato has woven them together intelligently here. For one thing, the two interpenetrate, with elevated tragic arias in the War half of the program, and complex dramatic conceptions in the Peace half. Sample Handel’s remarkable “Augelletti, che cantante,” from Rinaldo, with its sopranino recorder part and discursive development. Added bonuses are some world-premiere arias from the still largely unexplored corpus of opera seria from the middle 18th century, represented by compositions of Leonardo Leo and Niccolò Jommelli. Equally good are the big hits, including a magnificent, deliberate “When I am laid in earth,” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which shows the breadth of DiDonato’s conceptualizations of war and peace. The accompaniment from the historical-instrument group Il Pomo d’Oro under Maxim Emelyanychev is ideal. Recommended, whatever your views on the feasibility of world peace.