OK—so who
is it now?
Joyce DiDonato, the
American mezzo-soprano whom Dame Janet Baker
recently called “at the peak of her game,” or words to the effect. And when
Dame Janet says that about you, you can take the day off and go have a beer. Or
maybe not—maybe you should hit the practice rooms really hard that day. It’s
serious praise….
Well,
DiDonato would know, since she gave the single most cogent comments about the
inner critic when she gave a master
class at Juilliard, some time back. “Would you ever,” she asked, “ever
speak to another human being the way you speak to yourself?” Then she went on
to give a parody—no, wait, it was an exact replica—of the nonsense that lived
in my brain for about four decades: “that’s not GOOD enough you have to get
that better and it worked yesterday….”
You get the
picture…
Not
surprisingly, DiDonato also gave the most helpful, the funniest, and the most
supportive master class I’ve seen. Maybe because, as she stated in one
interview, she had once been savaged in a master class when she was a
student.
So of
course I had to watch DiDonato talking about her latest project, Drama Queens, which
features mostly unknown but by no means unworthy music. How unknown? Well, have
you ever heard of Guiseppe Maria Orlandini, who…wait, here’s Wikipedia:
Giuseppe
Maria Orlandini (4 April
1676 – 24 October 1760) was an Italian
baroque
composer particularly known for his more than
40 operas and intermezzos. Highly regarded by music historians of his day like Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Jean-Benjamin de La Borde and Charles
Burney, Orlandini, along with Vivaldi,
is considered one of the major creators of the new style of opera that
dominated the second decade of the 18th century.
OK, I’m
proud to announce that I’d heard of one of the names in the paragraph
above….
Right—what
about Giovanni Porta? Here I give you the full text of what Wikipedia has to say about him.
Porta is
believed to have been born in Venice.
One of the masters of early 18th-century opera and one of the leading Venetian
musicians, Porta made his way from Rome,
to Vicenza, to Verona, then London where his opera Numitore
was performed in 1720 by the Royal Academy of
Music (1719), and eventually back to Venice and Verona, and finally
Munich, where he spent the last 18 years of his life.
Well, as
you can hear in the clip below, Porta’s treatment of the soon-to-be-dying
Ifigenia is a knockout. But in fact, the album—which I bought weeks ago, and
which I listen to frequently—is filled with knockouts.
I once had
a friend who insisted: baroque music is the most expressive of all the styles
in classical music. And listening to this music, it’s not hard to make the
case.
The other
great thing about the album? Absolutely stunning performances by Alan
Curtis and Il Complesso
Barocco—performances that are both historically informed (as the jargon has
it) and also tremendously musical.
Il
Complesso Barocco is a joint endeavor by Curtis and the American crime writer Donna Leon, one of whose
novels I had just finished yesterday. Here’s one description of
how they work together:
Mr. Curtis
does the hands-on artistic and administrative work for Complesso. Ms. Leon
lends her name and underwrites the costs. But more than that, she travels
Europe, tracking down potential singers. And sometimes she appears in mixed
words-and-music shows herself, reading appropriate excerpts from her books: the
"operatic" moments in which Brunetti ponders (as he tends to) the
relationship between the lyric theater and real life or simply sinks into a
reverie about some favorite voice.
Well, she’s
a fascinating character. She writes during the day, and runs an opera company
during the evening. And she lives in Venice….
It’s
impossible to gauge the happiness or depth of fulfillment of any person’s life.
But why do I think Curtis, Leon, and DiDonato aren’t doing badly?
