By Ralph P. Locke

Pietro Auletta’s L’Orazio (1737), with substitute arias by other composers, gets a first-rate performance from the renowned Valle d’Itria Festival.

Pietro Auletta’s L’Orazio

Shira Patchornik (Leandro, Orazio), Valeria La Grotta (Giacomina, Ginevra), Matteo Loi (Lamberto), Martina Licari (Elisa), Natalia Kawalek (Lauretta), Camilo Delgado Diaz (Colagianni).

Orchestra Barocca Modo Antiquo/ Federico Maria Sardelli.

Dynamic [2 CDs] 125 minutes.

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What a difference a good performance makes! After suffering recently through the dutiful, bland world-premiere recording of what was an otherwise quite enjoyable Paisiello opera, I was revived by the joyous, stylish, and inventive recording — likewise a world premiere — of a comic opera by another eighteenth-century Italian, Pietro Auletta (ca. 1698-1771).

Pietro Auletta is much less well known today than Paisiello, but he had close to a dozen operas and other musico-dramatic works performed during his lifetime. Some no longer survive and perhaps were only given a single staging. Of all his works, only a harpsichord concerto has had much currency in modern times.

But the opera heard here, L’Orazio (Naples, 1737), got revived some twenty times in different cities over the next 27 years. Often a few or even many musical numbers by other composers were substituted for those by Auletta. Such a compound version is called a “pasticcio,” without the negative connotations of the word “pastiche.” Indeed, recent musicologists have pointed out that a pasticcio can be as coherent and effective as an opera from the hand of a single composer. Some of the later performed versions bore different titles, such as L’impresario abbandonato.

The work was published in Paris in 1753 as Il maestro di musica in a pasticcio version misattributed to Pergolesi. This was not unusual: dozens of works misleadingly attributed to Pergolesi were published at the time. (He had died young and thus could not object.) Indeed, a century and a half later, Stravinsky would rework some misattributed “Pergolesi” pieces in his ballet Pulcinella. Musicologists have had fun sorting all of this out (and thereby have also drawn attention to some very capable but forgotten composers of the period, notably Unico Wilhelm, Count van Wassenaer). In fact, the 1753 Paris version was reprinted in 1942 in a volume of the (overly inclusive!) complete edition of Pergolesi works. A 1955 recording of that version was rereleased on CD in 1988; it’s now easily accessible on streaming services such as Spotify. The main soprano was the great Elisabeth Söderström; the conductor, the renowned Lamberto Gardelli.

Alas, no handwritten or printed music survives from the original, all-Auletta 1737 version of the work. Thus, Bernardo Ticci was commissioned by the Valle d’Itria Festival to prepare a plausible edition, on the basis of the various sources that do survive from subsequent productions in other cities. Ticci chose to work primarily from a Florence manuscript that “consists of material from the 1740-1749 performances.” As a result, we are treated to some arias (added in Florence, Bologna, or London) by Michele Fini, Giovanni Battista Pescetti, Domingo Miguel Bernabé Terradellas (Spanish-born; he died in Rome at 38), Giovanni Orlandini, and Pietro Pulli.

I was prepared to dislike L’Orazio because I had never heard of Auletta (the Wikipedia article on him is a stub!) and because the music heard here is, by definition, a patchwork quilt. But the libretto, by Antonio Palomba, is very effective, and Auletta’s music and that of the five other contributing composers is a delight throughout. After all, the substitute arias were either composed for that particular point in the opera or at least were considered peculiarly appropriate for insertion there.

Also, there is a gratifying richness to the work as a whole: whereas a two-act intermezzo or farsa required only two or three singers and was often on the short side, here six characters are kept busy interacting. To add to the pleasant complexities (and opportunities for the respective singers), two of the characters spend much of the time in disguise: in the end, Leandro turns out to be the title character Orazio, and Giacomina is revealed to be Ginevra.

A scene from the Valle d’Itria Festival performance of Pietro Auletta’s L’Orazio. Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

The orchestration is colorful (with, in some numbers, trumpet parts, not just woodwinds and horns). Auletta’s overture is lost, so conductor Sardelli sensibly uses the lively one from Auletta’s other best-known opera, La locandiera (1738), which has, among other things, a spiffy passage for the horns.

The plot is full of fun. Lamberto is a music teacher in Venice; Colagianni is a Neapolitan theater manager and womanizer. Lamberto has two pupils: the immensely talented singer Giacomina and a new arrival, Leandro. (I wish that Lamberto had been given a name that wasn’t so easily confused with that of Leandro!) The latter two immediately recognize each other: they had become separated when pirates attacked the ship on which they were eloping. (Their real names are Ginevra and Orazio.) Leandro uses his wiles to prevent Colagianni from taking his beloved away from Venice to Naples.

Other characters arrive, bringing more complications, including a mute character (a music copyist) and Elisa (a young widow who turns out to be the sister of Leandro/Orazio). There are misunderstandings that spur splendid arias: notably, an impressive “aria di furore” for Giacomina/Ginevra, when she sees her beloved comforting Elisa. The work ends with a satisfying “chorus,” i.e., vocal ensemble, for all the characters (except the mute copyist). Or, rather, there is a first vocal ensemble, then a set of recitative exchanges in which hidden identities are revealed, and finally a shorter ensemble in which the characters agree to let past confusions be forgotten so that love can triumph: Orazio and Ginevra are reunited, as Lamberto and the mildly talented Lauretta join hands. (The nefarious Neapolitan, Colagianni, ends up empty-handed, as does, alas, the good-hearted Elisa. Perhaps the libretto is here revealing some prejudice against widowed women 300 years ago. For that matter, have things changed greatly since then?)

A scene from the Valle d’Itria Festival performance of Pietro Auletta’s L’Orazio. Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

The excellence of the performance surely has a lot to do with the fact that it was recorded during a stage production at the famous Festival della Valle d’Itria (Martina Franca). I have praised previous recordings from that festival: Paisiello’s wise and delightful La grotta di Trofonio and an unusual but very effective mid-nineteenth-century comic opera Nicola de Giosa’s Don Checco. I am heartened to learn that the festival is maintaining its standards, despite whatever cancellations and restrictions were forced on it by the Covid-19 pandemic. (This recording is relatively recent: from performances in late July 2023. Some applause has been left in, but not annoyingly much.)

The excellent early-instrument orchestra is under the alert command of Federico Maria Sardelli. If it is he who is playing the harpsichord in recitatives (along with a cello), he’s equally adept at that, adding all kinds of lively figurations that help propel the action onward. Sardelli makes a point, in his booklet-essay, that he purposefully avoided adding guitars, tambourines, and such; he argues that these are inappropriate in a late-Baroque opera, in which “refined poets and musicians” occasionally inserted subtle hints about regional musical and cultural traditions — such as in “the language of some servant girl or reference to some folk dance” — but rarely evoked such practices through literal reenactment onstage or in the orchestra.

The singers, to judge by their names, come from far and wide (e.g., Poland); Patchornik, who takes the title role, is a prominent lyric soprano from Israel. (It’s a pants role: she’s the “guy” in the white shirt, with her/his hair pinned up, on the album’s cover.) But they all sound utterly fluent in Italian and deeply engaged in their respective roles, filling the vocal lines with subtle inflections (slight chuckles, angered intensity, startled pauses, and so on). I would walk several miles to hear any of them, including the lovely tenor Camilo Delgado Diaz (from Puerto Rico), as the theater impresario who is smitten, hopelessly it turns out, with Giacomina (that is, Ginevra, magnificently sung by Valeria La Grotta). Occasionally, a singer rewrites the lowest notes in a line so he or she can manage them better or adds flourishes much higher than the written notes, and there is much embellishment when the A section of a da capo aria repeats. All of this sounds effortless, stylish, and convincing.

A scene from the Valle d’Itria Festival performance of Pietro Auletta’s L’Orazio. Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

Much credit must go to Bernardo Ticci for preparing a performing version based on the various scores that survive in Florence, Paris, Berlin, Dresden, and Stockholm. He was helped by conductor Sardelli and “J. Renshaw,” who must be Jean Renshaw: I find the latter listed online as the stage director for this production. It sometimes takes a village to raise an opera from the dead!

All the effort was well worth it. Auletta turns out to be a highly accomplished composer, as do each of the four other composers, and L’Orazio well deserves the fame that it engendered in its own day. May it continue to be performed and enjoyed!

Informative booklet and full libretto, both in Italian and mostly understandable English, though I choked on the word “aulic,” and “avoid” is used when “prevent” is meant.

It would help if Dynamic or Naxos (the distributor) would put the booklet online, for the sake of people who are listening by streaming. They should also have inserted track numbers into the (excellent) synopsis.

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and Senior Editor of the Eastman Studies in Music book series (University of Rochester Press), which has published over 200 titles over the past thirty years. 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. Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, The Boston Musical Intelligencer, Classical Voice North America. 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). The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here, lightly revised, by kind permission.