It’s a record in the form of a trip to Italy at the beginning of the 18th century, to a Venice that was intoxicated with music and a genre of performance that mixed comedy with it: opera. The composers compete in creativity to seduce the public and the show is permanent.
The Teatro Sant’Angelo disc (released on April 14 by Alpha Classics) by mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet with the baroque music ensemble Le Consort – increased in number to 17 musicians led by violin by Théotime Langlois de Swarte – pays homage to the eponymous theater and this period of effervescence and inventiveness where anything could happen, including the (recurring) presence of a bear on stage.
Vivaldi, therefore, who was the impresario of the theater and therefore left his mark on it, but also Fortunato Chelleri (1690-1757), Giovanni Alberto Ristori (1692-1753), Giovanni Porta (1675-1755) and Michelangelo Gasparini (1670 -1732) compose the soundtrack – largely unpublished – of this disc, exciting and which remains in the ear, which offers us a musical journey into unexplored lands. Between exciting discoveries and delicious flights.
Le Point: Your disc has a double particularity: it contains 12 unreleased tunes and focuses not on a work or a composer, but on a place… Why this double choice?
Adèle Charvet: The idea was to take a subject that you think you know perfectly well – here Venetian opera with a zoom on Vivaldi – and in fact say “there are a host of manuscripts that don’t have yet to be discovered and a lot of amazing music”. With this disc around Vivaldi and his contemporaries, it’s really a very high level of music that we were very keen to show. Especially around this theatre, the Teatro Sant’Angelo. At that time, Venice was the city in the world with the most theaters and operas and the Sant’Angelo Theater was a somewhat popular theater where a happy bazaar reigned. But, during the XVIII? century, there is finally not much music that is played there, there is rather theater with Goldoni. And then finally, the theater is demolished, it becomes a luxury hotel and, in fact, we have completely forgotten about it. And it was quite incredible to realize that, in a city like Venice whose history you seem to know perfectly well, in fact, there are still things to discover.
How is it possible that there are Vivaldi arias still being discovered, when he is one of the most famous composers in all of classical music?
It’s really lucky, actually. We worked with a musicologist specializing in Vivaldi, Olivier Fourés, who has manuscripts with tunes that are still unpublished. It seems extraordinary. Afterwards, we know that there are also scores that have been lost and, ultimately, there are always things to rediscover. And it turns out that in Italy, in the libraries, there are still things that are locked up, so we are very, very lucky.
What do these two unreleased arias tell us about Vivaldi?
We chose them because they’re a little different in the sense that it’s neither the Vivaldi, let’s say virtuoso, with fireworks of vocals, nor more dramatic and sad tunes. The two tunes we have chosen are between the two. There’s one that’s very short, a bit like a joke, with a funny and ironic text and with popular accents, and that’s something we’re not used to hear from Vivaldi. As for the second, it is on the contrary very interior, with a rather tortured and complex harmonic development. And it is, I find, an interiority also that we do not know about this composer.
And as a singer, what does it mean to be the first to sing those tunes in centuries?
Ah, but it’s extraordinary! It’s a huge honor and it forces humility. We want to do justice to this music. But this music is so strong that it actually speaks for itself. We think we know that era, that repertoire, well, and, in fact, there are still new things to discover. It’s extraordinary.
How did this record project around an emblematic place of a certain era come about?
First of all from a common desire with the Le Consort ensemble to make music together, more particularly Italian music, because it is something that we had already experienced a lot in concert and which suited us well. . Then, it’s thanks to Olivier Fourés, who gave us this theme from the Teatro Sant’Angelo on a silver platter. And we said to ourselves that we could not miss such a fascinating subject.
How did you put together the program for this disc, which has a lot of unreleased tunes, as we said, but which also focuses on capturing the soundscape of an era?
First with a major work session with musicologist Olivier Fourés. We spent hours and hours reading manuscripts, choosing scores… Then, in a second step, there was research work which was done more in threes with the harpsichordist Justin Taylor and Sophie de Bardonnèche, who is second fiddle to the Consort, and myself. Also read entire operas that have never been performed. And so the question of choice arose. When you read manuscripts and look for new music, you think, “well, we’ll probably read some pretty mediocre stuff and find a nugget.” And there, there were too many nuggets and it was rather necessary to proceed by elimination. What is essential? What also makes us stand out? What do we want to defend? And that’s how it happened. We wanted a kind of dramatic evolution and a lot of contrasts, it allowed us to incorporate gondolier songs to open and close the record… Like going to the opera in a gondola!
