Ann Hallenberg - Arias for Marietta Marcolini (Rossini's First Muse) (2012)

The lives of the singers who appeared on opera stages in the early 19th century are gradually coming to light. One of them, Marietta Marcolini, is described here as Gioachino Rossini's first muse, but other researchers have described such figures as creative contributors to the opera of the period, which had a substantial improvisational component. That comes through on this release, which gives Swedish mezzo soprano Ann Hallenberg plenty of room to stretch out into ornate decoration. The program includes a few familiar Rossini arias, but Marcolini was famous before she ever met the young Rossini, and the primary innovation here is the collection of arias from the almost totally neglected period of Italian opera between Mozart's death and Rossini's rise to prominence. The arias by Johann Simon Mayr, Giuseppe Mosca, Carlo Coccia, and others are mostly big pieces, drawn from among section finales and the like, and they show the development of style in Rossini and even more so in his successors as a process of simplification; they are multisectional pieces with plenty of fire. Both she and conductor Fabio Biondi have backgrounds in the historical performance of Baroque vocal music, but they don't try to apply techniques from their performances of music from that period here. Biondi in particular avoids the explosive style of his Baroque performances in favor of smooth, self-effacing readings that put the emphasis squarely on the singer. And Hallenberg steps up: her voice is not massive, but the agility is right for this music, and her vision of how the two arias from Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri would have sounded in their own time is lively and charismatic. They get excellent support from Naïve's engineers, working in Frank Gehry's Stavanger Concert Hall in Norway; it doesn't look as though it would make a good stand-in for a medium-sized Italian opera house of the early 19th century, but it does.