Behind every silver lining, there’s a cloud. Or several. Behind the pleasure of welcoming this new recording of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione lurks the realization that it is musically rather thin, its historic importance notwithstanding. First staged in Florence in 1600, the Rappresentatione came into being in a rather fevered atmosphere as Cavalieri vied with several others (notably Caccini and Peri) to stage and print the very first music dramas. The sacred character of its libretto (an allegorical dramatization of the forces at work on a human soul choosing between good and evil) sets it apart from the mythological subjects treated by Cavalieri’s rivals (hence certain points of contact with oratorio). The music is deliberately simple: not a bad thing in itself, but one cannot hear a scene like the first of Act 3 (in which Intellect and Counsel warn the Soul of the torments of Hell) without being reminded of Monteverdian dialogues (say, that between Orfeo and Caronte): how much more dramatic are these, how acute psychologically. Where Monteverdi derives a powerful rhetorical logic from Striggio’s strophic form, here both the action and the music are weighed down by it. On this recording, Cavalieri comes across as an enterprising and gifted amateur, and no more.
‘On this recording’, I say: the second cloud over this issue is the performance. We know from Andrew Parrott’s superb recording of the Intermedi to La Pellegrina (EMI, 8/88) that for all its simplicity, Cavalieri’s music can be far more involving than this. Where aplomb, imaginative ornamentation and lightness of touch might have conveyed the directness of Cavalieri’s idiom, Vartolo’s approach seems all too often to emphasize its lack of subtlety. Listen for example to Time’s monologue at the start of Act 1. (Elsewhere, the contrast between the souls of the damned and those of the elect may be effective on stage, but with only the sound to go on it comes across as very heavy-handed.) Nor are individual contributions (with a few honourable exceptions) more felicitous. The singing especially is very uneven, which is a pity since a number of these musicians are experienced recording artists who have given sterling accounts of themselves elsewhere. Where they might have drawn their inspiration is not an easy matter to decide, for the acoustic does none of them any favours: it is boxed-in and lifeless, an impression not helped by the gimmicky-sounding over-dubbing of the ensemble during the libretto’s spoken passages (first disc, track 2). Alas, not recommended.'