No, It's Not Opera, Oh No !

Coincidentally a second successive disk off the shelf featuring Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre but this time as the backing band for mezzo Cecilia Bartoli on her album Opera Proibita. Another of Bartoli's concept projects, the link here is that the music dates from the early 18th century in Rome when the Catholic church had effectively banned the opera. Many of the church's cardinals were music and opera lovers however and so the ban was circumvented by geting composers to use ostensibly sacred texts in very elaborate operatic settings, providing the fix of beautifully sung arias that the afficionados were missing. The composers whose music appears on the disk are Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Caldara. Listening to the tracks without recourse to the texts or the background, it is simply like listening to a finely sung and beautifully played recital of high baroque music. On the whole, la Bartoli is an integrated team player with maybe just the occasional lapse into showiness and exaggeration. Her reticence in the recording is made up for by he lavish packaging and the somewhat incomprehensible link ( Catholic censorship ) made with the fifties Fellini film La Dolce Vita and Anita Ekberg in a fountain !