Nicola Porpora - Arias
Karina Gauvin; Il Complesso Barocco; Alan Curtis
ATMA ACD2 2590
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi – The glory of this world is fleeting. What an apt description of the current status of Nicola Porpora. At one time, creator (with poet Petro Metastasio) of some of the greatest triumphs of musical performance that pleased monarchs, delighted their courts and held sway over public imagination – today Porpora is little known and even less recorded. Six of 14 arias on this disc are world premiere recordings. How could the vocal teacher of castrati Caffarelli and Porporino, female superstars La Romanina, Nicola Grimaldi and Lucia Facchinelli, the man who discovered his most important protégé, Farinelli, be so thoroughly neglected? Well, there are two reasons for that: there are no more castrati and, secondly and most importantly, the music of Nicola Porpora was always meant to be a neutral background on which to showcase the castrato’s voice. His arias are not necessarily brilliant or groundbreaking – in fact, many of them seem repetitious. However, endowed with the sound of the castrato’s voice they must have been stunning. Such voice is impossible to replicate. Even for the film Farinelli, the producers digitally “mashed” the counter-tenor and soprano, to achieve a desired effect. The Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin continues to amaze with the beauty of her voice, increasingly focusing on Baroque music. Technically flawless, in this recording she is augmented by the “first leaguers” of period performance, Il Complesso Barocco and Alan Curtis. So if no single human being can reproduce the castrato’s voice, we owe Ms. Gauvin thanks for approximating it for us.
