Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Porpora: Germanico in Germania

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Nicola Antonio Porpora (1686-1768) was a contemporary of George Frideric Handel and one of the most important composers of Italian opera seria at the end of the baroque era. For a while when he was composing for the Opera of the Nobility company in London he was also Handel's rival. Porpora was in addition a teacher of opera singing, his most famous pupil being the castrato Farinelli. I have featured Porpora's music on this program on only one previous occasion. That was on Sunday, April 2, 2000 when I aired the CPO recording of a sacred work, his oratorio Il Gedeone ("Gideon," 1726).

The opera seria called Germanico in Germania premiered in Rome in 1732 with an all-male cast, starring another one of Porpora's illustrious pupils, the castrato known as Caffarelli. The entire canon of Handel's Italian opere serie has been recorded in historically informed baroque instrumental and vocal practice. But Porpora's operas have lagged far behind in getting onto disc. This one has been issued in Decca's recent series of recordings of obscure Italian baroque operas. The last one I have aired was Pergolesi's Adriano in Siria (1734) on Sunday, October 22nd of last year. The high male voice of Max Emanuel Cencic is heard in many of the works in this series. Cencic specializes in those heroic roles that were once intended for castrati. Here he portrays Germanicus, a commander of the Roman army in Teutonic territory along the river Rhine. Jan Tomasz Adamus leads the period instrumentalists of the Capella Cracoviensis. Germanico in Germania was recorded in the studios of Radio Krakow in Poland in 2016. Decca released the recording on three compact discs in 2017.