FULL ORFEO DOLENTE (Domenico Belli) Florence 2024 Nikolai Gladskikh, Anna Chiara Mugnai, Giorgio Marcello
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Orfeo Dolente
- Composer: Belli Domenico
- Libretto: Gabriello Chiabrera
- Venue & Opera Company: Palazzo Davanzati, Firenze, Italy
- Recorded: June 28, 2024
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Nikolai Gladskikh, Anna Chiara Mugnai, Giorgio Marcello, Viola Conti, Francesca Caligaris, Gu Chenan
- Conductor: Martino Noferi
- Orchestra: Ensemble strumentale del dipartimento di musica antica del Conservatorio di Luigi Cherubini di Firenze
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Yaroslava Maltseva
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Orfeo dolente is a musical work by Domenico Belli, an example of a representative style of the first Baroque era.
The opera – divided into five interludes – was performed for the first time at Palazzo Gherardesca in Florence, home of Ugo Rinaldi, in 1616.
The myth of Orpheus – which recurs in this as in other contemporary compositions – was a central theme for the origins of opera and this composition is still considered one of the best examples of the so-called recitarcantando.
The well-known Italian composer and conductor Bruno Maderna made a transcription of it in 1968.
Belli, who had little musical production at the end of his career, has been defined – also by virtue of this work – as a researcher of passions through music. A research carried out through modern procedures for his times, exalted in the use of violent dissonances. He is described as excelling in the tragic, choosing to underline this aspect by renouncing the embellishments in the vocal part used by his contemporaries.
Florentine by birth and contemporary with other fathers of opera (from Jacopo Peri, to Giulio Caccini, from Emilio de’ Cavalieri – author of the Representation of soul and body – and Marco di Gagliano) he created this work together with other court, such as dances, interludes and even a maritime fable about the story of Andromeda.
Together with Orfeo dolente, Belli published two other collections of music in the same year – 1616: the Officium defunctorum and his Primo libro delle Arias, works which today constitute the only traces of his compositional activity.
In Orfeo the Florentine composer seeks in this case even more than elsewhere, and in line with the work of the authors of his time, different ways to express a type of music that reflects – in a more adherent manner to the new needs and urgencies required by new court shows – an explicit expression of passions.
To achieve this objective he therefore resorts to modern procedures, if related to the time, with an enrichment of the monodic formula, in itself already ahead of its time, through violent (and artificial, one might say) dissonances (and some arias which have reached the present day – type Of your eyes and I Ardo but I don’t dare – I am a clear testimony of this).
Furthermore, by denying any embellishment of the singing – and privileging the flow of the notes – it almost suggests a preponderance of music over cantability in the expression of every type of affection (a theory which would then find not too indirect confirmation in the eighteenth century when the concept was established of First the music, then the words).