Opera Album Review: Leonardo “no-dah” Vinci’s “Gismondo” — Quite Wonderful Stuff, Splendidly Performed.

By Ralph P Locke

Lovers of Baroque opera will want to scoop this one up quickly. I certainly have more respect and affection for Leonardo Vinci, now that I’ve come to know several of his operas.

Leonardo Vinci: Gismondo, re di Polonia (1727)

Sophie Junker (Cunegonda), Dilyara Idrisova (Giuditta), Aleksandra Kubas-Kruk (Primislao), Max Emanuel Cenčić (Gismondo), Yuriy Mynenko (Otone)

{oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna/ Martyna Pastuszka and Marcin Swiatkiewicz

Parnassus 9120104870017 [3 CDs] 218 minutes

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One of the best opera releases of the past calendar year was without doubt this world-premiere — apparently, though the matter is not mentioned — of an opera by Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730).

(The composer was no relation to the similarly named but much better-known visual artist, so I think of him as Leonardo “no-dah” Vinci.)

I came to the recording with high expectations because I had been so impressed with two slightly earlier Vinci recordings: his Didone abbandonata (based on a plot similar to that of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas) and Siroe, re di Persia. (See my review of Siroe here.) Other record critics have written with admiration about two other Vinci operas: Partenope and Artaserse. (The Artaserse featured the astonishing countertenor Philippe Jaroussky.)

This latest Vinci offering is brought to us by Parnassus Arts Productions, an early-music organization in Vienna that was founded to perform and record early operas. This recording appears on the organization’s own label (Parnassus). Parnassus Arts Productions also provides artist’s management (e.g., career promotion and representation) for the singers.

This seems a fascinating arrangement, though I suppose it is fraught with risks: favoritism in assigning roles, say, or inequities in salary. Does the organization have an ombudsman for dealing with internal complaints? Do the singers belong to a union to protect their rights against their all-powerful boss? Oh, well, too many unanswerable questions here, but the results, to the ear, are astonishingly wonderful!

The cast seems international, to judge by their names. The recording seems to have been recorded in the studio but with most of the same performers who participated in two (unstaged) concert performances in September 2018: one in Gliwice (in southern Poland), the other at Vienna’s famous Theater an der Wien.

The opera is set in sixteenth-century Poland, which must have made it particularly intriguing to the audience in Gliwice and to the Poles in the cast and in the orchestra, which calls itself “{oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna.” The “{oh!}” that begins its name is a kind of branding, presumably based on the first letters of Orkiestra Historyczna, which of course means Historical[-Performance] Orchestra. (This is the first time I believe I have ever heard an early-instrument orchestra from Poland.) Presumably the Parnassus gang chose a Polish orchestra and Gliwice as a performance site because this opera takes place in Poland — or vice versa: they chose this obscure Poland-based opera because they were going to be performing in Poland with Poles.

Two music directors are listed. A photo in the booklet shows Martina Pastuszka clutching a violin, so she is presumably the concertmaster, and Marcin Swiatkiewicz is termed “maestro al cembalo,” which must mean that he plays harpsichord in the recitatives. The continuo group also includes a second harpsichordist, a lutenist (with a gorgeous tone), and a cellist.

The result is an energetic and highly accomplished recording of this opera about Sigismund August II (in Italian: Gismondo; in Polish: Zygmunt; 1520-72), the first ruler of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The prolific Vinci composed it for Rome in 1727, three years before his death at 40, a relatively early age even in those days.

Composer Leonardo Vinci. Photo: Wiki Commons.

The cast involves various men of power: King Gismondo of Poland, his son Otone, two princes of Gismondo’s realm, and Duke Primislao of Lithuania. Among the forces that play out are Prince Ermano’s desire to avenge his brother’s death and the struggles between various of the men for the affections of Gismondo’s daughter Giuditta and of Primislao’s daughter Cunegonda. Along the way, Cunegonda goes to battle dressed as a man and, hearing a report that her father has been killed, heaps abuse on Otone. In the end, misunderstandings are cleared up, Cunegonda and Otone will marry, as will Giuditta and Primislao, and all sing of peace between the realms with Gismondo on the throne.

The original cast was entirely male, as was required at the time in Rome (but not elsewhere). Here we have a typically modern-day roster: female sopranos for Cunegonda and Giuditta and a female mezzo and two countertenors in the three most prominent male roles.  This all works out fine, especially since Aleksandra Kubas-Kruk (the mezzo) does a good job of suggesting Primislao’s maleness without overdoing it.

My, these singers have secure and flexible voices! (Maybe it helps for an opera company to have as its artistic director a first-rate vocalist such as Cenčić.) They always sound as if they understand what they’re singing. They embellish the music, but rarely to excess, except that (to my taste) some of them suddenly ascend to notes much higher than what the rest of her or his role holds — a striking effect that I think distracts from the true merits of the score.

My favorite singer here, perhaps because I had not heard him before, was Yuriy Mynenko (from Ukraine), performing with ineffable sweetness an aria about a nightingale who sings of sadness and (in the contrasting B section) love. Oh, but how can I not mention Sophie Junker? In “Tu mi tradisti, ingrato,” she gives a master class in how to shift between straight tone and carefully titrated vibrato, all in the interests of conveying Cunegonda’s sense of having been betrayed by Otone. (I hear a single horn playing an internal harmonic line that might normally be taken by the violas; did Vinci assign this, or did the performers? It adds a nice touch of darkness.)

Vinci here, as in Didone and Siroe, proves himself a highly capable exponent of high-Baroque style. One could easily mistake some of these arias for ones by Handel, Hasse, Telemann, or Vivaldi — in quality and manner.

The work consists mainly of arias, separated by lengthy exchanges in recitative. Otone gets no fewer than eight arias, conveying a wide range of emotional states. Refreshingly, some arias contain prominent passages for oboes, recorders (emblematic of Otone’s nightingale), horns, and small bassoons (faggotini).

The orchestral strings are given a wide range of figurations, as in the B section of Cunegonda’s “Tu mi tradisti” or her powerful Act 3 recitativo accompagnato on the battlefield (disc 3, semi-hidden in the middle of track 8). Fascinatingly, a sense of meter gets thrown off in that same character’s subsequent anger aria, “Ama chi t’odia.” (The translator ineptly renders this as “Love that hates you,” as if “ama” were a noun. Cunegonda is taunting Otone: “Go ahead and love the woman who hates you.”)

Unfortunately, the booklet-essay focuses primarily on actual and possible echoes, in the libretto, of current and recent political events in Poland, Denmark, and elsewhere. Because the words were written 19 years before Vinci set them (the original composer was Antonio Lotti), the writer ends up dealing with two greatly differing sets of complex political circumstances. Worse, not all of this is necessary for us to know in order to appreciate the work.

The whole essay is pretentiously written, using circumlocutions instead of direct statements. Its turgidity is increased by yet more errors in translation. As every student of German learns early on, the word “sie” can mean “she” or it can mean “they.” The distinction is usually evident in context: for example, whether the verb is singular or plural. The translator chooses the wrong translation twice in the first paragraph, totally changing the writer’s meaning into something quite untrue. She also misnames the composer as if he were the famous painter Leonardo da Vinci and refers to the string orchestra as a “string quartet.” German-speakers have long used “Quartett” to refer to the string sections of an orchestra, but Anglophones will be puzzled.

The {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna. Photo: Magdalena Halas.

Still, the music is here, the libretto is printed in the thick booklet (in four languages, including Polish), and the performances range from the highly capable to the startlingly virtuosic. I could have done without some of the orchestra’s purposely noisy and overemphatic attacks. The added percussion, fun at first, may annoy on repeated listening.

Lovers of Baroque opera will want to scoop this one up quickly. I certainly have more respect and affection for Vinci, now that I’ve come to know several of his operas.

Some tracks — or separate recordings of arias and scenes with the same performers — are available for free on YouTube. A two-minute trailer is available here. The whole thing can be heard on Spotify and other streaming sites.

Alas, the recording is not available on Naxos Music Library, the one site that lets you download booklets. So the only way to get the smallish book containing the libretto, synopsis, and essay is by purchasing the CD set. Unless there’s a way to download the book and recording from the Parnassus Arts Production site, but I haven’t figured it out. Well at least you can hear selected tracks there, at the top right side of this screen.

Warning: the track list is printed on a separate page that is easy to misplace. I’ve already had to hunt for it twice in the past few weeks! And you’ll need it because track numbers are not stated in either the synopsis or the libretto.


Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York ArtsOpera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). A version of this review first appeared in American Record Guide and here appears by kind permission.

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