Fabio Bonizzoni - Campra: Gli strali d'amore (2011)

Fabio Bonizzoni has come up with another imaginative and enticing programme for his latest Glossa release, creating an Italian “pastiche” drama with music by André Campra and with the starring presence of soprano Roberta Invernizzi. This is the next new hit from La Risonanza to follow on discs devoted to music by Handel, Lully and Alessandro Scarlatti.

André Campra, a major figure in the world of French opera between Lully and Rameau, was clearly not very impressed by the former’s discouragement of Italian musical practices inside France when he was elevated to the post of surintendant de la musique du roi. In many of Campra’s French opéras:ballets and comédies:lyriques written by him as the 18th century was emerging out of the 17th (the period of the summit and the waning of the reign of Louis XIV) are to be found interpolated many dashing arias with texts in Italian (Campra’s father was Italian:born like Lully padre e figlio) and from some of these Fabio Bonizzoni and Angela Romagnoli have chosen and concocted Gli strali d’Amore (Love’s Arrows), thereby, curiously, following in the footsteps of Campra himself – who was a dab hand at this activity himself, as demonstrated by his own Les Fragments de Mr. De Lully.

Joining Bonizzoni and Invernizzi (Glossa has recently issued a “Portrait” album involving the Milanese soprano) in this delightful sequence of recitatives and da capo arias recorded in Tuscan Brunello are the impressive Cyril Auvity and Salvo Vitale, and a sprightly La Risonanza, together with an informative booklet essay from Barbara Nestola.