Opera concert "Baroque Gala"

The "Baroque Gala" does not attempt to cover the entire century and a half era in one evening. The concert programme offers us just one, but an extremely important perspective: an insight into the Italian branch of the High Baroque and its two main achievements — opera seria and instrumental concert style.
Opera, or melodramma seria, was a moralistic, sublime, and cruel art. In its plots there acted rulers, gods, and heroes, love conflicted with honour and duty, and virtue was always rewarded. In the first half of the 18th century, such operas were staged all over Europe, from London to Lisbon and St. Petersburg — almost exclusively for the entertainment of a narrow circle of the highest nobility. Monarchs competed with each other in the wealth and luxury of their court theatrical productions. Star performers — singers, castrati and prima donnas, earned as much as the Hollywood actors, and commoners, whose taxes, labour, and sometimes blood paid for all this splendour, happened to beat famous artists when they met them in the streets.

Virtuosos encouraged composers to write music that was increasingly sophisticated technically; in some arias, vocal coloratura would not fall short of the frantic sound cascades of violin parts in complexity. The singers also were required to be able to improvise. Changing the melody when repeating it, showing off in cadences — all this was and still is a model of vocal prowess and one of the main subjects for the listener of baroque music. The soloist in the opera was obliged to show a wide range of emotions, for which the composer provided him with a proper number of arias in various moods — fury, heroic pathos, love lyrics, sorrow, and exhilaration. As a result, three-part arias da capo (almost all the numbers in the concert are of this type) turned out to be the most important vocal form of the time; composers of Handel's or Scarlatti's level composed more than a thousand such arias each in the course of their career.

A German who spent most of his life in England, Handel was at the same time one of the major representatives of the Italian style, and his works naturally occupy the central place in the evening's programme. Arias from his operas were written during the triumphant London period, when a superstar trio — castrato Senesino, Francesca Cuzzoni, and Faustina Bordoni sang in the performances of the Royal Academy of Music headed by Handel. These give way to arias from English-language oratorios written later, when Italian opera in England went out of fashion and was cast into oblivion for a couple of centuries. Its style and methods, however, continued to live in a new guise — in the aria of Deyanira from the oratorio "Hercules", Handel transforms the da capo form into a dramatic scene and anticipates the scenes of madness from the bel canto operas of the 19th century.

Besides arias, the only purely instrumental compositions in the programme also belong to Antonio Vivaldi. Among them there is a concert from the collection "L'estro armonico" — perhaps the most influential collection of instrumental music in the 18th century. And next to them there are the arias of the composers of "the second rate", whose music, in fact, is no weaker than the music of recognized stars: its harmonic experiments are no less bold, the vocal parts are no less puzzling, and the orchestra sounds with the same lyrical or wrathful force. Italian music is direct and sensual; it resists distanced listening and irresistibly draws us into its emotional orbit. Perhaps this is where the secret of its popularity is hidden, the popularity that is not ceasing even now, 300 years later.