Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Vinci: Siroe

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

In the first half of the eighteenth century Naples was as great a musical city as Vienna would be later on. Napoli was an especially big town for opera. The Neapolitan style in Italian opera influenced opera composers all over Italy and Europe in the high baroque period. Sadly, all the notable opera composers active in Naples at that time went to early graves, like the much-esteemed Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730), who lived only slightly longer than Mozart.

Like Mozart, Vinci crammed so much composing into just a few years. He wrote some forty operas, mostly opere serie and some buffe or comic works, too. Only now in the twenty-first century are the Neapolitan masters: Vinci, Durante, Leo, Pergolesi, et al finally getting their due in musically complete, historically-informed recorded interpretations of their works.

On Sunday, October 18, 2015, I broadcast the Decca world premiere recording of Vinci's Catone in Utica (1728) with Il Pomo d'Oro period instrument ensemble, Riccardo Minesi conducting, and featuring Max Emanuel Cencic as Arbace. The remarkable high male voice of this singer gives us some idea of what the castrati superstars of old were capable of.

Vinci composed Siroe, Re di Persia (1726) for premiere in Venice, not Naples. It has a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, the foremost progressive librettist of the age. His Siroe libretto was set to music again and again over the course of the century. In London Handel took it up; Handel's Siroe (1728) was heard on this program on Sunday, October 3, 2004.

A concert performance of Vinci's Siroe was given at the historic Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 2018. A female vocalist, Cristina Alunno, handles the heroic male role of the Persian monarch. Antonio Florio conducts the theater orchestra. The Italian label Dynamic issued Siroe on three CDs in 2019. This, too, is another world premiere recording.