Estratti dal Cd

Eccomi ponta all'armi - Recitativo I   743 Kb

Son zitella poverella - Aria Eurilla  791  Kb

Il pipistrello - Aria Beltramme  1,3 M

Languiscono d'amor -  Aria Eurilla  613 Kb

Vedo Amor -  Duetto finale  606 Kb

“Gli Intermezzi Ritrovati”

"EURILLA E BELTRAMME"

In 2001 the project “Gli Intermezzi Ritrovati” (“The Rediscovered Intermezzi”) was created, promoted by Le Musiche da Camera ensemble and Associazione Area Arte, aimed at the study and the staging of rare and unperformed works in this repertoire of great musical and theatrical interest, with philological criteria and with a playing style aimed at reproducing the vivacity and the authenticity of the scena. At Teatro Sancarluccio in Naples between 2001 and 2003, the intermezzi “Eurilla e Beltramme” by Domenico Sarro, “Morano e Rosicca” by Francesco Feo and “Erighetta e Don Chilone” by Leonardo Vinci (directed by Franz Prestieri, with protagonists Rosa Montano and Giusto D’Auria), were presented in their first modern stagings, productions which have had further performances in several Early Music festivals. At a distance of five years from the first staging, this recording documents the new production of Sarro’s “Eurilla e Beltramme” intermezzi, performed on 19^th February 2006 at the historic Court Theatre of the Royal Palace of Caserta.  

Egidio Mastrominico

In the carnival season of 1722, the production of Partenope at the San Bartolomeo theatre in Naples, with the music of Domenico Sarro, signalled the return of a text that had been seen for almost a quarter of a century on the stage of the most important Neapolitan theatre of the epoch: in fact the libretto had been written for the 1699 season of the same San Bartolomeo theatre by Silvio Stampiglia, a Roman poet and one of the major exponents of the Arcadian Academy, who at the time found himself in Naples serving at the court of the viceroy Duke of Medinaceli, and who on that occasion found himself collaborating with the Brescian composer Luigi Mancia, author of a melodrama which was regularly produced in those days but which was soon forgotten in favour of other works. The production of 1699 signalled then the beginning of a happy destiny for a text which was set to music many other times up till the middle of the 18^th century, by Caldara, Vinci, Vivaldi and Handel, amongst others. Sarro’s score, conceived for the Neapolitan production of 1722, whose manuscript is conserved in the library of the San Pietro a Majella conservatoire, included the Eurilla e Beltramme intermezzi with a new text by the same Stampiglia, who that same year had made a return to Naples after having been historian and poet laureate at the Hapsburg court for several years. The frontispiece of the libretto of Partenope, printed for the 1722 performance, was as follows: “Drama in music by Silvio Stampiglia, known by the Arcadians as Polemone Licurio, His Majesty’s poet, rewritten by him for the San Bartolomeo theatre for the 1722 season, dedicated to Cardinal Federico d’Althann, deputy viceroy and captain general of this kingdom”. The intermezzi were on this occasion interpreted by two already renowned specialists of the new comic repertoire: Santa Marchesini, one of the pioneers of the genre, and Gioacchino Corrado, bass buffo regularly active at the San Bartolomeo since 1704, where in 1733 he would play Uberto in Pergolesi’s Serva padrona, after which he became the protagonist of many “musical comedies” at the Teatro Nuovo.  

 With Eurilla e Beltramme we find ourselves before a work which represents the intermediate stage of that long phase of the journey from the so-called scene buffe of the late 17^th Century melodramas – in which the comic elements were condensed to avoid a stylistic mixture disagreeable to Arcadian rationalism – to the true comic intermezzi, with their full autonomy from the serious drama, even printed with a different typeface. In Eurilla the umbilical cord between intermezzo and drama hasn’t yet been cut, the frame of the plot is the same but centre stage are two characters - Beltramme (“one of the mock Armenian servants of Rosmira”) and Eurilla – who don’t appear in the principal text and who here become the protagonists of an insubstantial event based on what became known as the dramaturgical topos of the Intermezzi: the passage from an initial situation of conflict to the idyllic final reconciliation.  Inside a comic register which, as usual, is based on the contraposition of personalities (the pompous pride of the female character in contrast to the cordiality and clumsiness of the male character), on the nods towards the novelties of the present time (the fashion of smoking and drinking coffee at the opening of the 2^nd scene), and on explicit and diffused double meanings with an erotic background, the text often assumes meta-theatrical and parodistic connotations, targeting the bellicose accents of the heroic style (in the opening recitative), the mythological stereotypes of musical tragedy (3^rd recitative), and the literary arguments against melodrama (5^th recitative).

The comic elements are strongly accentuated by a music whose quality seems decidedly superior to the average verifiable in seventeenth century intermezzi and which induces us to take another look at the current opinions about Sarro, a composer on whom still weighs the shadow of more famous colleagues such as Scarlatti, Mancini and Vinci, and who is all too often remembered almost uniquely for his two historic “primacies”, that of having been the first to set a melodrama of Metastasio to music and that of having composed the opera which inaugurated the Teatro di San Carlo in 1737. To the affected simplicity which characterises the arias of Eurilla – especially the last, Languiscono i pastori, subtly parodistic of a certain Arcadian sentimentality – he opposes the more extrovert comicity of the arias of Beltramme, where he frequently adopts a realistic and sometimes almost caricatured treatment of the text, that often assumes forms of phono-symbolism: from the long sequences of repeated notes that accompany the vocal line of the first aria,  Par che la febbre a freddo, to show the trembling of the protagonist; to the pointed bounce of Il pipistrello è un certo uccello;  to the convulsive acceleration which gives expression to the growth of Beltramme’s excitement in Guance  morbide, guance intatte.  Also responding to the same compositional strategy are the brisk exchanges of some recitatives and above all certain pressing dialogue sequences of the duets, like the central part of Deh movetela ad amarmi and the strict contrapuntal interweaving which in the finale, Vedo amor che pien di dolcezza, gives sonorous body to the happy conclusion of the amorous flirtation.

Pier Paolo De Martino

Translated by John Dean

Italian Traslated 

Press

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE Vol 70 N.6 Nov/Dic 2007    

 ".......D'Auria blusters and Montano connives charmingly; the orchestra scratches dutifully, and the harpsichord sparkles"   (C. PARSONS)

 DIVERDI.COM 5 abril 2007

La versión contiene todo el sabor conveniente a la partitura. Ha sido registrada en uno de los palacios carolinos, el de Caserta, y la orquesta se compone de instrumentos históricos, entre ellos la tiorba, la mandolina, el mandolón, la guitarra barroca y el clavicímbalo. Los sostenidos aplausos del público demuestran que el respetable la pasó muy bien.    ( BLAS  MATAMORO)

SUONO n.405

"Questa riproposta moderna - una vera novità - ha trovato una realizzazione molto elegante nel Teatro di Corte del Palazzo Reale di Caserta;....gli Intermezzi mostrano una bella vena melodica nel garbato fraseggio dei due pimpanti protagonisti: Rosa Montano e Giusto D'Auria."   ( di Umberto Padroni)

MUSICA n.189

" C'è chi continua a riproporre stereotipe Serve padrone e chi invece meritoriamente getta l'occhio su intermezzi dimenticati....Apprezzabile la realizzazione del basso continuo, fantasiosa e ariosa con mandolini, mandole,chitarra barocca, tiorba e ovviamente cembalo. La responsabilità maggiore ricade però sulle spalle del soprano (Rosa Montano - Eurilla) e del basso (Giusto D'Auria - Beltramme)  alfine convincenti." ( di Lorenzo Tozzi)

AMADEUS GIUGNO 2007

" Il cd testimonia uno dei non molti allestimenti di lavori teatrali barocchi che oggigiorno hanno luogo sui palcoscenici italiani. ........Rosa Montano e Giusto D'Auria affrontano con gradevole spigliatezza le schermagli amorose. La sottolineatura caricaturale fa parte del gioco....."( di M.R. Zegna)

http://guide.dada.net/critica_di_musica_classica/interventi/2007/03/288663.shtml - di Marco Del Vaglio