At the beginning of the eighteenth century Naples was one of the greatest cities in the world -- the eighth-largest, by one widely used ranking. Its musical culture has nevertheless been somewhat obscure, partly because the holders of archives there have been chary about sharing them with the rest of the world. Thus the re-release of this 1996 album by the Cappella de' Turchini under
Antonio Florio is doubly welcome; the reissue is on France's Naïve label, which produces mostly original material, but one will quickly understand why they made an exception in this case: the music isn't like anything else you've ever heard. As the Per la nascita del verbo (For the Birth of the Word) title suggests, these are Christmas cantatas of a sort. Their distinctive qualities start with their texts, which use symbolism to convey the Christian message in direct and highly entertaining ways. The specifics of the birth of Christ are barely in view. Plunge in with track 1, Cristofaro Caresana's La caccia del toro (The Hunt for the Bull). It seems to be actually a bullfight that is being described ("Sallies and thrusts: Humility tries them time after time"), with the bull as a stand-in for Satan, in a struggle with Humility. Each cantata is a short religious drama, with choruses, arias, and five or six individual characters, and the musical illustrations of the action are vivid and energetic. The imagery of the pastoral rarely seemed fresh at this point in time, but the ecstatic treatment of the theme is Caresana's La pastorale, track 3, is remarkable. Ecstatic as well is the sole instrumental work on the album, the Passagagli con partite pastorali of Bernardo Storace (track 5), in which a small harp seems to float heavenward. The music seems linked to popular roots in La tarantella, which contains a melody historically associated with that southern Italian folk dance and is likewise of a symbolic nature (Lucifer here is a "tarantula from hell," vanquished by the "innocent Lamb"). The vocal works are in standard Italian, interestingly, not Neapolitan dialect; although the texts are lengthy, full translations are commendably provided in German, English, and French. The performers give the music the zip it deserves, and the instrumentalists are confident exponents of the wide variety of strings, winds, and continuo instruments deployed in the accompaniment. A superb recording, well worth the time of everyone from specialist to casual fan of Baroque music.