La Partenope

A musical gem with tongue-in-cheek production equals great fun. Even if the composer Leonard Vinci titled his opera a "Drama per Musica", Partenope is in fact an entertaining sophisticated light weight comedic experience. For the sake of history I must add that the title of the opera by Vinci when first presented at the Teatro S. Giovanni Grisostomo at carnival 1725 was "La Rosmira fedele". It was based on a Neopolitan score by Dominico Natale Sarro "Partenope" to which Vinci had contributed. (Partenope is the patron of Naples). Vinci had only a few weeks to come up with a new score for Venice so his Rosmira contains much material from Sarro; all recitatives and most orchestral work- all arias are by Vinci. The libretto by Stampiglia had been used by several composers.The star of this presentation is the presentation. The sets are standard classic but the costumes, gestures, balletic movements and acting are all high comedy (parody?) and combined with excellent vocalization and orchestral playing by I Turchini di Antonio Florio gives us a great performance.The composer Leonardo Vinci (1696-1730)was a brilliant comet that swept over the middle Italian operatic firmament of the early 1700s and died out too soon. His first operatic efforts started in 1719 and ended in 1730. In those eleven years he wrote and performed some 31 operas as listed in Grove's Dictionary of Opera. He became famous overnight for his new style of vocal writing he termed "dynamic periodicity" that became the standard of classic vocal style. His fame was so great that the older Handel rearranged and presented some of his works after his death and dedicated his own version of the Partenope story to him.In this production of his opera now called Partenope, we have her as the ruler of the city she founded but she is pursued by numerous suitors. One Emilio of Cumae threatens war if she does not submit. The other suitors ally themselves with her in this battle and in the latter part of Act 1 is one of the best faux battle scenes with balletic, vocal and musical resources used that I've ever seen staged. As noted before the singing is excellent in general with classic fioratura obbligato well executed. The Queen Partenope Sonia Prina (alto) is a master of this style and is outstanding. Great singing, great staging; a must have!

Attention, all you who have ever fretted about "Regietheater" or ranted about "Eurotrash" in a production of an 18th C opera! This production is perhaps your dream come true, as aesthetically "authentic" in visual and theatrical values as any living audience could possibly tolerate. The costumes, it's true, are bizarre ... ludicrous in fact, with the male characters wearing ballooning skirts and feathered helmets ... but they are recognizably based on costume sketches from the archives of the French theater in the Ancien Regime. The stage machinery is patently hand-operated and the sets are charmingly pre-modern. The lighting ... well, that's blessedly electrical. The gestures, posture, facial expressions, etc. of the singers are all as stylized, affected, and ballet-like as the performers can make them, though some of the singers are plainly more consistent in maintaining their poses than others. Some of the rear-stage antics of the dancers are unlikely to have been compatible with a performance in Roma in 1724, or even in Venice in 1725, but those antics are scarcely noticed via DVD. There's good evidence that Baroque singers customarily posed stage-front and sang their arias to the audience almost as if in concert, and indeed many of the arias of this production are performed in exactly that manner. Productions of "opera seria" such as Partenope were often rendered more enjoyable for hoi polloi by the inclusion of "intermezzi" -- brief low-brow comic scenes -- before and between acts. The musical and comedic "contents" of the intermezzi that Leonardo Vinci tolerated in his serious productions of Partenope have survived in outline and are the basis of the drollery you'll see on this DVD. The "patter" in Spanish between Beltramme (Borja Quiza) and Eurilla (Giuseppe de Vittorio, in hilarious drag) is updated and topical, as it would have needed to be in Venice in 1725, but their musical ditties in Italian are preciously authentic. This is a production that takes the business of NOT taking "seria" too seriously quite seriously.Queen Partenope, the mythical founder of Naples, is surrounded by would-be lovers, one of whom is the king of the enemy Cumaean hinterlanders, one of whom (the tenor, of course) is subserviently faithful, and one of whom is an opportunist who has abandoned a previous fiancee in Cyprus. That betrayed fiancee inevitably arrives, dressed as a man, seeking revenge. The role of Partenope was originally filled by Faustina Bordoni, the most acclaimed alto of her era, for whom both Handel and Hasse composed. Thus it's absolutely proper that Partenope is sung in this production by Sonia Prina, one of our most accomplished altos who often gets stuck in trousers. Two of her suitors, Emilio and Arsace, are sopranos, in those male hoop-skirts I mentioned above. The female Rosmira, disguised as the male Eurimene, is sung very artfully by soprano Maria Grazia Schiavo, although I couldn't help imagining the effect of having "her" sung by a castrato, or nowadays a countertenor, in the ultimate baroque gender-bender. The four women singers are musically top-drawer in this performance, and get the HIPP nod to embellish their da capos as floridly as anyone might have wished in 1725. Steffano Ferrari sings the role of the deeper-voiced suitor Armindo a tad too manfully and bluntly, suggesting perhaps why composers of the early 18th C rarely assigned prominent roles to tenors.Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730) patched his Partenope together in utmost haste, on demand in Rome with hastier revisions in Venice, adapting a 1699 Neapolitan libretto by Silvio Stampiglia and recycling all of the recitativos from the 1722 setting by Domenico Sarro, as well as Sarro's brief 'military' instrumental interludes. In short, only the arias are Vinci's, and several of those were recycled from Vinci's own earlier operas. The libretto had durability. It was set first by Luigi Mancia, then by Antonio Caldara, then by Manuel de Zumaya for performance in Mexico City in 1711, and eventually by Handel for performance in London. Handel had the highest appreciation of Vinci's work, borrowing from it freely with Vinci's explicit consent.You may be surprised to learn that there are three operas by Leonardo Vinci available on CDs: Partenope, the opera seria Artaserse, and the opera buffa Li Zite 'Ngalera. I've heard both Partenope and Artaserse live, and I can't say that I find the former as musically exciting as the latter, which is unfortunately only available on CD.  Vinci: Artaserse  Artaserse was justly one of the most popular operas of its age. There is a CD of Partenope also but you'd miss all the fun of the intermezzi and at least half the amusement of the dramaturgy by going that way. And, if you are an avid fan of baroque opera, watching this historically informed staging will heighten your awareness of the challenges of producing Baroque operas for modern audiences.

I think that this was my first exposure to baroque opera. The performance was great fun. The sets were very classic; breathtaking even. The costumes were opulent; though I agree with an earlier reviewer that they were confusing and made gender identification difficult (I think that the those playing women were in long skirts and those playing men in shorter tunics). The stage lighting at times (particularly early) was very dim for my lit watching space. The images were solid; the color great and the sound very good. The English subtitles were easy to read, made sense and positioned so as not to detract from the stage action. The split between the two DVDs is between the end of Act 1 and the start of Act 2. There were times when the close-ups during arias prevented one from seeing the other stage action but this was not a consistent problem. The producers, director, conductor and performers have successfully brought a 286 year old work back to life.

I did not know Leonardo Vinci's opus, but bought this DVD on a lark, because of his name. Was I in for a surprise! Superb production. In general, the male voices were not up to par, but the women, some of them playing trouser roles, were far suited to the florid Baroque music. Giuuseppe di Vittorio and Boria Quiza, as representatives of the Spanish Crown, stole the show, switching from flawless Spanish to equally flawless Italian. This is, after all, an opera written about the mythical founder of Naples, Partenope, at a time when the city was under Spanish rule. Baroque at its best. I am finding out that "obscure" Italian opera houses are far more adventuresome that their more well known counterparts!

Todo bien menos los interludios en español.

Una excelente ópera y una producción única. Lamento que el dvd no haya incluido el making of; el cual puedes encontrar en you tube.

Awesome. Really a treasure of Italian opera.

certes pas aussi parfait que l'Artaserse du meme auteur, mais une vraie découverte de ce méconnu de VINCIà deguster de temps en temps !

This production of La Partenope by Leonardo Vinci (not to be confused with Leonardo da Vinci) is spoiled in this recording by the inclusion of an excruciatingly boring threefold intermezzo involving a man in drag and a young man. I think it's supposed to be funny, which it may well have been for the Neapolitans of the age during which the work was composed; but this is not a good reason for inflicting it on modern audiences. When I watch this work again I shall press the button on the remote control and skip over these intermezzos, which simply detract from the flow of the plot. Although some viewers might very well enjoy these intrusions, I'm sure there are others who, like me, will find them an unnecessary annoyance.I find the costumes worn in this production very strange. Whilst the female characters wear mostly long, puffed out, voluptuous floor length dresses, the male characters, several of whom are women pretending to be men, wear calf-length, puffed out, kilt-like garments, which have all the appearance of being a cross between a kilt and a female ballet dancer's tutu as seen in such ballets as Swan Lake. Does anyone know if there was a day and age in which men actually dressed like that? Although it's well established that ancient Egyptian men wore kilt-type garments, none of them look like the kilt-cum-tutu garments worn in this opera. Happily, seeing these interesting costumes helped to make up for the awful intermezzo performances. It seems to me that these strange garments would not have been very practical when moving around on a cold and windy day. Anyway, I can tell you, it's worth buying this DVD just to see all these fascinating styles.Everyone is falling in love with Partenope, superbly played and sung by Sonia Prina, and it gets all the more confusing when it's revealed on the advent of a duel that the man Eurimene is really the woman Rosmira, who has spent most of the performance wearing a particularly attractive kilt-cum-tutu. There's lots of very enjoyable music and singing, apart from which this whole production is worth watching just for the costumes. My own taste is to either reel over the intermezzos (intermezzi?) or pop into the kitchen and make a cup of tea whilst they're going on. Initially the intermezzi made me so cross that I felt like downgrading this work to one star; but that would be very unfair to the opera itself which is great stuff. So it's five stars for the singing, five stars for the music, five stars for the staging and five stars plus for the extraordinary costumes. Who knows? They might even start in a new fashion in kilts. Buy and enjoy.