HASSE Marc' Antonio e Cleopatra
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Johann (Adolph) Hasse
Genre:
Opera
Label: Deutsche Harmonia Mundi
Magazine Review Date: 12/2014
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 90
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 88883 72187-2
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra |
Johann (Adolph) Hasse, Composer
(Le) Musiche Nove Claudio Osele, Conductor Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, Cleopatra, Soprano Johann (Adolph) Hasse, Composer Vivica Genaux, Marc' Antonio, Mezzo soprano |
Author: Richard Wigmore
Some of the lyrical arias, especially Mark Antony’s final vision of the Elysian Fields, adopt the smooth, clearly articulated melodic style of the emerging galant manner. But listening ‘blind’, you might mistake the more vigorous numbers for Hasse’s teacher Alessandro Scarlatti, or even Handel. Cleopatra has the most forceful and memorable music, above all in the tumultuous aria in which she resolves to commit suicide. Understandably, this casting here does not seek to replicate the original gender reversal. Abetted by coruscating (if rather too forwardly recorded) playing from the strings of Le Musiche Nove, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, slender but keenly focused of tone, sings with terrific verve and commitment. She nicely catches the mingled ironic mockery and steely resolve of Cleopatra’s character (some way from the sex kitten in Handel’s near-contemporary Giulio Cesare), bringing a native Italian’s relish to the text, in aria and recitative, and using Hasse’s coloratura flights to enhance the expression. Mazzulli spins a touchingly pure line, too, in the final aria where Cleopatra faces death with stoic melancholy.
As in Plutarch and Shakespeare, Mark Antony cuts a more passive figure, a nostalgically inclined ageing lover rather than a warrior hero. Sounding uncannily like a countertenor with freely produced top notes, Alaskan mezzo Vivica Genaux is ideally cast as Mark Antony. Tender without mawkishness in his avowals of devotion, Genaux rises thrillingly to the moment where Mark Antony is shaken from elegiac mode to vent his despair at the prospect of Cleopatra’s death. Conducted with fire and sensibility, eloquently sung and characterised, this new recording makes a vivid case for a work that helped launch the most spectacular operatic career of the age.
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