Vivaldi’s setting of Apostolo Zeno’s libretto L’Atenaide was first performed at the Teatro di Via della Pergola in Florence on December 29, 1728, at a time when the new Neapolitan style of Vinci and Porpora was becoming dominant all over Italy. The opera was not well received, with criticism particularly aimed at Vivaldi’s mainstay opera singer Anna Girò. The only surviving complete score of the opera, now in Turin’s Biblioteca Nazionale, contains an extensive revision made in the early 1730s (probably for a projected revival that never took place), but the Pergola theatre is the only Vivaldian opera house that still exists in a fully historical condition. This recording benefits from what Federico Maria Sardelli describes as the venue’s “unchanged, perfect acoustics”. With such a fuss rightly made about bringing Vivaldi’s opera back to the place for which it was composed, one wonders why Naïve did not include at least one picture of the theatre in the chunky booklet.

The essay by Frédéric Delaméa claims that Atenaide displays “deep stylistic originality combined with formidable musical riches”, and his view is supported by this consistently strong performance. Vivica Genaux, Nathalie Stutzmann and Guillemette Laurens all contribute some good dramatic singing, and Romina Basso’s creamy melodic singing is outstanding. In particular, the extraordinary monologue for the title-heroine in Act 3 is magnificently sung by Sandrine Piau. Conductor Sardelli argues that he is “more and more convinced of the need to…protect [Vivaldi] from the deplorable modern tendency to make him into a prodigious purveyor of eccentricities and of rhythmic and dynamic convulsions which are almost invariably arbitrary”. Unlike some of the flashier approaches to Vivaldi by some of the artists involved in Naïve’s compelling series of Vivaldi’s operas, Sardelli’s methods are never extreme for the sake of a cheap thrill. Here we find a sincere attempt to let the story unfold through clearly communicated and simply delivered recitatives and superbly paced arias, and Modo Antiquo play with plenty of vivaciousness and sonority. This performance always seems to have solid and deeply satisfying foundations.