Following Ariodante – released in 2011, starring Joyce DiDonato, and hailed by BBC Music Magazine as “the Ariodante to have” – Virgin Classics presents the latest recording in its series of Handel operas conducted by Alan Curtis, whom the Financial Times, reviewing Ariodante, praised for his “inspiring musical direction”.
If Ariodante is an acknowledged operatic masterpiece, the delightful Giove in Argo (Jupiter in Argos), written just four years later in 1739, is surprisingly little known. This is the first recording of the edition published in 2012 by the authoritative Hallische Händel-Ausgabe..
No copy of the composer’s complete score exists today, but the libretto printed for the London’s King’s Theatre (the original libretto was written for Dresden by the Venetian poet Antonio Maria Lucchini) suggested that two arias were missing. They were rediscovered in 2001 at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum by Professor John Roberts of the University of California, Berkeley, turning out to be the work of Handel’s younger contemporary, the Neapolitan-born Francesco Araia. The likelihood is that they were ‘suitcase arias’ – showpieces that travelled with Giove’s prima donna, Costanza Posterla. Appropriately brilliant, they are by no means inferior to the succession of spectacular arias that Handel himself wrote for the score, which also contains more choruses, eight in all, than any other opera by Handel.
Using the London libretto as his guide, John Roberts produced a performing edition of the entire score, which incorporates the two Araia arias and new recitative for Acts II and III. His version has been conducted, to great acclaim, by Alan Curtis at the Handel festivals in Göttingen and Halle (the composer’s birthplace), and in Hanover, Vienna and La Coruña.
As ever, Curtis, conducting Il Complesso Barocco – from which, as the Financial Times said, he “draws playing of infinite flexibility and unforced style” – is surrounded by singers of acknowledged prowess in the Baroque repertoire. Giove (disguised as a shepherd) is sung by the young tenor Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani, while Iside and Calisto, the objects of his desire, are portrayed by familiar members of Curtis’ operatic company: mezzo soprano Ann Hallenberg (who appears in Curtis’ Virgin Classics recordings of both Handel’s and Gluck’s versions of Ezio) and the soprano Karina Gauvin (Ginevra in Ariodante). Bass Vito Priante – singing Erasto, the shepherd who turns out to be the King of Egypt – also appeared in Gluck’s Ezio, which in 2012 was named Operatic Recording of the Year (17th/18th Century) in Germany’s prestigious Echo Klassik Awards.
