Il Complesso Barocco & Alan Curtis - Gluck: Demofoonte (2020) [CD-Rip]

Christoph Willibald Gluck's Demofoonte was premiered in 1743 and revived several times in the 1740s, only to disappear into the mists of history, overshadowed by the composer's "reform" operas that wove music and drama more closely together. Its modern premiere came in 2014 in Vienna, at the hands of Baroque opera conductor and researcher Alan Curtis and his ensemble Il Complesso Barocco. Curtis wrote most of the recitatives, which were missing, basing their style on other early Gluck operas. He also added a three-part Sinfonia in the style of Gluck's mentor, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, to replace the missing original. The present recording, knitted together from recordings made in Italy and Switzerland, features many of the singers from Curtis' premiere production, including the impressive countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and soprano Sylvia Schwartz as the pair of secretly married lovers Timante and Dircea, with the latter under threat of being sacrificed due to a Thracian oracular command. Modern-day audiences are at a disadvantage in that viewers in the 18th century would have known the story well; the libretto, by Pietro Metastasio, was set about six dozen times. It's action packed, and even if three hours plus of unknown opera may be a lot for the general listener, the story is engaging. Most interesting is the music. It's true that the naturalness of Orfeo ed Euridice was still almost two decades away, and the opera seria march of recitatives and big arias was still fully in force, but melodically, the arias float on new breezes, with fetching melodies and little showy virtuosity. With a booklet that doesn't even get to the work at hand until its third page, this release will be of the most interest to serious students and fans of mid-18th century opera, though its appeal may extend beyond those circles, and the recording could easily stimulate further performances from operatic stars. ~ James Manheim