Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Piccinni: Didon

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

No, it's not a misprint! The name is Piccinni, NOT the today better known Puccini, with only one"n" and a "u." Niccolo Piccinni (1728-1800) was famous in his time as an Italian opera composer. Piccinni wrote a huge amount of opera: easily a hundred operatic works or more, against the mere dozen works of Giacomo Puccini.

The operas of Piccinni fell out of the repertoire in the nineteenth century. One of his most popular ones in French language, first staged at Fontainebleau Palace and subsequently at the Paris Opera is Didon (1783), a tragédie lyrique in three acts setting forth the story of Queen Dido of Carthage and her tragic love affair with the Trojan refugee, Aeneas. It all ends badly in the queen's abandonment and her suicide, more or less as we know it from Henry Purcell's little English baroque opera.

Piccinni's Didon is in the galant early classical style of Gluck, who was Piccinni's colleague, or rather rival in Paris, with partisan opera politics entailed. Today Gluck is regarded as the more important historical figure, so you could think of Piccinni's music as Gluck-lite: pleasing to the ear but maybe lacking a certain Gluckian emotional weight.

Didon is a new release from the Italian Bongiovanni label, as recorded in 2021 for unstaged studio purposes in the Cavalli Auditorium of Castrezzato. Damiano Cerutti directs the Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana and Ab Harmoniae chorus. Soprano Denia Mazzola Gavazzeni takes on the title singing role. Didon appeared on two Bongiovanni compact discs in 2022.