Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Vinci: Catone in Utica

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Leonardo Vinci (1696?-1730) lived an even shorter life than Mozart, but he wrote many more operas than the Austrian child prodigy: at least forty works for the lyric stage, some of them comedies in Neapolitan dialect that were the forerunners of the Italian opera buffa.

A musical progressive, Vinci developed a style that was moving from the late baroque into the pre-classical. His twenty-or-so opere serie have long lain forgotten. I was overjoyed to discover one of them has received its world premiere recording for the Decca label, released this year on three silver discs. Catone in Utica (1728) has a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, who back then was also considered a progressive. This particular opera seria was intended for an opera house in Rome, where the Pope had banned female singers from the stage. So the entire cast of Catone consisted of male voices. The female roles were taken by the soprano-voiced castrati.

It's amazing to me that, I guess for reasons of historical authenticity, the six cast members in the Decca recording are all men. Three of them are countertenors in place of the 18th century geldings. The cast is backed by an Italian period instrument ensemble, Il Pomo d'Oro, directed by Riccardo Minasi.

Lovers of baroque opera will remember my broadcast on Sunday, November 17, 2013 of Vivaldi's Catone in Utica (1737), in its reconstructed score by musicologist Alessandro Ciccolini (Opus 111 CD's in their 'Vivaldi Edition" series).