Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Salieri: Armida

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

In the eighteenth century there were so many operas that bore this name about the beautiful sorceress/princess, or named after the noble knight Rinaldo who loved her. Over a span of decades I have devoted at least thirteen shows to different Armida/Armide operas. There's also the Rinaldo opera by Handel and Rossini's Armida in the early 19th century and Lully's tragédie en musique going back to the seventeenth, which was reworked in the 18th century by Francoeur. Most recently, on Sunday, October 24th of last year, I broadcast the Teldec CD reissue of Haydn's Armida (1784), a 21st-century recording that has supplanted the Philips LP release, with Antal Dorati conducting, from 1979.

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) tackled the subject early on in his career as an opera composer. His Armida premiered with success in 1771 at Vienna's Burgtheater. Opera librettists spun off so many variants of the original story derived from the epic poem by Tasso. In Marco Coltellini's libretto the story ends in the usual way: enraged over how Rinaldo has abandoned her and gone back to the ranks of the Crusaders, she wrecks her magic pleasure palace and rides off into the sky in a chariot drawn by winged monsters.

On Sunday, February 11, 2018 I broadcast the Lully Armide (original 1686 version) as interpreted by the period instrument players of Les Talens Lyriques and the Chamber Choir of Namur under the direction of Christophe Rousset. Rousset leads the same musical forces, with four vocal soloists, in the 2020 world premiere recording of the Salieri Armida. The French Aparte label issued it in 2021 in a deluxe book-type CD package: a numbered limited edition. Talk about rave reviews! Fanfare magazine's Bertil Van Boer states flatly: "There is nothing to say about the performance other than that it is uniformly excellent." (Fanfare, Sept/Oct, 2021.)