Matthew Rose, Arcangelo, Jonathan Cohen - Arias For Benucci (2015)

The program on this release by baritone Matthew Rose is innovative and useful in a couple of different ways. First, although performers have sometimes tried to bring 18th century opera to life by programming arias written for specific singers, this has usually been applied to countertenors. They were generally the stars, it's true, but they weren't the only ones. The Italian comic baritone Francesco Benucci was one of the leads of Joseph II's Italian opera company, the original Figaro, and the original Leporello in Don Giovanni in the Vienna premiere (the second production). Mozart would have known him well and written music with his capabilities in mind. Better still, other composers wrote for Benucci as well, and by programming arias from these works, Rose gets unusually close to Mozart's cultural orbit. Mozart followed the aria types of these other composers and even quoted Vicente Martín y Soler's Una cosa rara in the supper scene of Don Giovanni. For the serious Mozart-ian, this album is undiscovered gold, and about the only complaint is that Rose, although he gets all the notes, is sometimes working hard enough to do so the comic spirit of the music is squeezed out. He's not helped by vague, spatially inappropriate church sound from Hyperion, which tends to swallow him up. Nevertheless, this release will take the confirmed fan of Mozart's operas to new depths. -- James Manheim