Composed in 1766, La Canterina (“The Singing Girl”, or, as the booklet-note has it, “The Diva”) is Haydn’s earliest surviving stage work, a brief comic intermezzo in the tradition of, say, Pergolesi’s Serva Padrona. The four characters are stock-in-trade buffo figures: the aspiring diva, Gasparina, a manipulative, money-grabbing minx; Apollonia, her pretended mother adept at procuring suitors for her ‘daughter’; the oily, lascivious singing teacher, Don Pelagio, in whose studio the women are living rent-free; and the wealthy young lover, Don Ettore, who is finally promised Gasparina’s hand amid hints that Pelagio will not be left out in the cold. Though Haydn’s response to dramatic situation can be too relaxed and genial (as in Pelagio’s distinctly unthreatening ‘eviction’ aria near the start of Act 2), the score has plenty of lively, fetching invention and some amusing comic touches: in the singing-lesson-as-seduction, for instance, where Gasparina can’t even sight-read the first phrase of the aria Pelagio has written for her; or in the two arias that parody the grand manner of opera seria, the second (in which oboes are replaced by doleful cors anglais) in a mock-tragic C minor, with Gasparina, in time-honoured fashion, protesting ad infinitum “piu voce non ho” – “I no longer have a voice”.
On the whole Rudolf Palmer and his all-American team of soloists give an enjoyable account of the piece. The orchestral playing (on modern instruments) can be a shade heavy, wanting in point and comic brio, with wind short-changed in the balance – though the resonant acoustic doesn’t help here. Tempos sometimes seem on the cautious side. But the singers all bring a real whiff of greasepaint to their roles, with D’Anna Fortunato a blowzy, gushing ‘mother’, Brenda Harris, if slightly squally at the top of her range, a knowing, vivid Gasparina with a nice line in mock-innocence, and Joyce Guyer displaying an appealingly bright, slender soprano in the small travesty role of Don Ettore. As Pelagio, Jon Garrison compensates for a touch of rawness in his tenor with some deft vocal acting.
Palmer chooses to preface La Canterina (which lacks an overture) with Haydn’s Symphony No. 1 of a decade or so earlier – a near-contemporary D major piece like the second movement of No. 34 would have made a better stylistic match; and he follows it with a nondescript flute concerto disingenuously attributed to Haydn on the booklet cover but which, as the note discreetly admits, has long been known as the work of Leopold Hofmann, a composer regarded by Haydn as a braggart “who fancies that he alone has achieved Parnassus”. The concerto is ably performed by Emily Newbold; but I don’t intend to sit through its amiable meanderings again. Still, Haydn collectors shouldn’t miss this first-ever recording of La Canterina, whose attractions are enhanced by John Ostendorf’s entertaining note and racy translation.'