La Nemica D’amore Fatta Amante by Chiara Banchini

I listened to Giovanni Bononcini’s serenata La Nemica D’amore Fatta Amante (“Enemy of love without a lover”) performed by Ensemble 415 under the direction of violinist, Chiara Banchini.

Their performance is wonderful and beautiful accompanying by sensitive and elegant sophistication. All the three singers, Adriana Fernandez (soprano), Martine Oro (countertenor) and Furio Zanasi (baritone) are also wonderful. Adriana Fernandez also gave me the strong impression by the excelled beauty of her voice in L’Orfeo by Jordi Savall previously.

The whole album is filled with the soothing beautiful sounds. It is wonderfully thought through and well directed album.

This serenata has the very similar love triangle story to Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo but much less harshness. Not only the storyline, the over all music has the very similar feel to Handel’s music.

According to the production note, Bononcini had worked with Handel at the Royal Academy of Music, as a composer for 13 years while Handel was the music director there. They even performed together, Bononcini as cellist and Handel as harpsichordist. They were rivals as composers but according to the production note, Handel who was 20 years junior often borrowed music from Bononcini (there was 44 years difference between their compositions of  “Ombra mai fu”.)

They could have been bitter rivals, but as far as I can tell by just listen to Bononcini’s music, they have so much common musically. They have very similar musical sensibility. They both had the keen sense and excellence for the dramatic, melodious and lyrical tunes with very similar elegant sophistication.

There are number of arias which are very beautiful in this album. Bononcini especially wrote the most moving thoughtful arias for the role of Martine Oro with very beautiful cello lines as basso continuo.

I must say that Handel was genius while Bononcini was extraordinary talented, who also should have been more famous.

Aci, Galatea e Polifemo by Emmanuelle Haim

Emmanuelle Haim directed this Handel’s cantata/serenata with the orchestration by Le Concert d’Astree in 2003.

Contralto, Sara Mingardo sang Galatea. She’s impressively wonderful as always. 

Soprano, Sandrine Piau sang Aci. As the same way as Mingardo, she is also exquisite as singer. Her singing is impressively mature and her pearl-like rich voice is very beautiful, which matched well with Sara Mingardo’s.  But at times, her high soprano notes sounded overly ornamented a little in this production.

Bass, Laurent Naouri sang Polifemo with warm beautiful deep rich bass voice. He’s also very mature singer and sang very well.  And because of these reasons, his Polifemo also felt less scary and less dramatic.

Comparing to the first rate quality of these singers, the quality of Haim’s orchestration was somewhat downgraded though they played very well. I expected her music to be vibrant, agile and muscularly tight as her later works. So it was little surprised that her music was much softer and less focused. It is very understandable because this was her first recording production.