For most listeners, if they know his name at all, Nicola Porpora was the composer who took the young, impoverished street musician Franz Joseph Haydn under his wing and created one of the greatest geniuses in all of Western music. For much of his career, Porpora tended to be in direct competition with another figure who happened to be more popular; no sooner had his rival in Venice, Leonardo Vinci, died in 1727 did Europe witness the rise of Johann Adolf Hasse. Traveling to England with his star pupil Farinelli, Porpora locked horns with George Frederick Handel for primacy on the London stage...and lost. It is also his bad luck that, in posterity, Porpora has to share his historic time frame with not only Handel, but with Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach. Although Porpora was at least productive in most musical mediums, it was in opera where he made his strongest mar; very little of Porpora's operatic music has been recorded, even in part. Canadian soprano
Karina Gauvin and
Il Complesso Barocco under
Alan Curtis are rendering, in a practical sense, a tremendous service to the understanding of eighteenth century Western music through selecting a program of 13 arias and one overture from Porpora's key operas and realizing them here, in Atma Classique's Porpora Arias. Such a rigorous and intellectual observation does nothing to convey what a splendid experience this disc is, and it appears most followers of great singing will get something out of this even if they care not a whit about Nicola Porpora.
Gauvin is just awesome. Her instrument is powerful and extremely present in this excellent Atma Classique recording, with seemingly inexhaustible resources for expressiveness and dramatic fire when called for. These are tough arias; a fair number of them were written for Farinelli, but
Gauvin is more than up to the level of endurance needed to carry them off with style and aplomb. Porpora's operas would be a tall order to revive in whole form owing to their unusual structure; they contain practically no recitative and consist of long strings of arias, defeating almost any dramatic interest that their libretti might have deigned to deliver, and in some cases the libretti were weak to begin with. On the other hand, Porpora's great and consistent strength was in the excellence of his orchestrations and
Curtis and
Il Complesso Barocco do not shrink from that advantage, setting flexible tempi and paying close heed to the implied dynamics and accents of these scores. In a harmonic sense, Porpora was more interesting and innovative than Handel, though one can forgive contemporary audiences for their addiction to Handel and his deft, elegant rectitude; some of these lush, French-flavored arias must've played like music from outer space in eighteenth century England.
Listeners will be thankful to Atma,
Curtis,
Il Complesso Barocco, and especially
Gauvin for this splendid recital, both for what it reveals about Porpora and for its sheer entertainment value.