Benedetto Marcello’s Arianna was composed as part of an entertainment held in honour of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in the Academia de’ Nobili in Venice in the winter of 1726. The work, described as a serenata, was thus written by a noble musical amateur for an aristocratic private gathering. This is not to say that the music is incompetent – far from it: Marcello’s polished score bristles with originality and inventiveness. But the original context might help explain certain aspects relating to the overall conception of the piece – why it has been neglected for so long and why a revival is not altogether unproblematic.
Probably the most important of these aspects is that Marcello and his librettist Pietro Pariati would have expected their select audience not only to have known inside out the tale of Arianna, her desertion by Theseus and her subsequent marriage to the god Bacchus, but also, very probably, to have seen and heard other musico-dramatic versions by Marcello’s contemporaries with which to compare it. From Monteverdi to Richard Strauss to Alexander Goehr, Arianna’s plight has inspired composers, but modern audiences cannot share in the familiarity with every detail of the story and appreciate the subtle differences in approach shown by composer and librettist in the baroque period.
We can, of course, appreciate the music – each da capo aria is clearly and imaginatively characterised – but the original context must explain something about the curiously undramatic approach to the third part. Indeed, the piece climaxes about halfway through, with Arianna’s aria beseeching Theseus to return to her (‘Come mai puoi’), a lament that takes place not when she finds herself deserted in the first instance, but later, when it becomes clear that the man she helped escape from the labyrinth is resolutely in love with her sister Phaedra. Beautifully scored, with a two-flute obbligato, this is indeed a magical moment. The contrasted arias of the first two parts successfully portray the conflicting emotions of the characters with almost Handelian intensity, but as soon as Bacchus’s identity is revealed towards the beginning of the third, the drama evaporates. Presumably Marcello’s audience was quite happy to accept that Arianna would immediately forget her pain at Theseus’s betrayal of her love because her other suitor, whom she has spurned over the course of two hours, turns out to be a god, but for a modern audience it is difficult to make it other than dramatically unconvincing.
Even the excellent performance by Filippo Maria Bressan, the modern champion of Marcello’s music, cannot quite prevent a feeling of deflation in place of genuine catharsis. The soloists are all good (so many wonderful young early-music singers are coming out of Italy these days) and sing their roles with conviction and style, and Bressan’s Academia de li Musici are impressively technically secure and admirably flamboyant. Only the Athestis Chorus are a slight disappointment, lacking a really focused sound. Despite this minor quibble, I can thoroughly recommend this recording, both for the interest of a previously unknown work and for the compelling performance.'