Cavalli: Artemisia (complete opera recorded in 2010)

"The score is a musky pot pourri of dewy love songs, indignant recitatives, balmy passacaglias, lullabies and laments...Together with Silvia Frigato's nimble page Eurillo, Allegrezza delivers a warm performance...the house style is super-stylish and the continuo uniformly suave."
(BBC Music)

"The music is terrific and so is the cast. The singers are especially adept at putting across the dialogue, which has the vigour of a staged performance...The orchestra is perfect: six plucked continuo instruments plus single strings, which accompany some of the arias...this is a triumph for Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana."
(Editor's Choice Gramophone Magazine Sept 2011)

"Cavina's choice of singers is perfectly matched to the scale of the production. Soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli captivates us from the very start...It's a voice which can be steely, vulnerable, pathos-laden, joyous and deceitful - all without over-singing or drenching the vocal lines with vibrato...Engeltjes plays the love-interest, Meraspe, with a Michael Chance-like thinness of tone. It's brilliant...the rewards are outstanding."
(International Record Review)

"Meraspe's act three lullaby is among the most beautiful things [Cavalli] ever wrote...La Venexiana's performance nicely captures the work's dominant tone of sadness... The vocal honours go to Roberta Mameli and Marina Bartoli, heartbreaking as Artemia and Ramiro."
(The Guardian)

Where next for Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana after their exhilarating run of recordings of Monteverdi madrigals, operas and much more?

One route is proving to be in the direction of Francesco Cavalli, the 17th -century composer who spent much of his working life in Venice, starting off as a chorister in St Mark's Basilica when Monteverdi himself was in charge. Although Cavalli has been known as a composer of Venetian seicento sacred music, it is his prolific contribution in the field of opera - where he became one of the leading figures involved in the development of commercial opera companies from the 1640s onwards - that has been receiving greater attention from artists in more recent times. And it is with a dramma per musica in Artemisia from the mid 1650s, with its tale of love, deceit and honour and the upholding of the virtues of the Venetian Republic (all this richly captured by the expressive style of Cavalli), that Cavina has chosen to contribute to that fresh look at Cavalli's music on this new recording from Glossa.

Singers in the established style of La Venexiana, including the vocal star of 'Round M, Roberta Mameli and, recent finalist in the Handel Singing Competition, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (who takes the role of the love-torn Queen Artemisia, a character strong enough to drink her dead husband's ashes...) give vent to this glorious display of Venetian operatic splendour.