Il Pomo d'Oro and Jakub Józef Orliński: Facce d’Amore

Castratos were the stars of the Baroque period. Castratos often played the role of the hero or lover in operas that are today more or less well-known by composers such as George Frideric Handel, Francesco Cavalli, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti and Nicola Matteis. As castratos no longer physically exist, their roles are now sung by women or, as in tonight’s concert, by a countertenor.

Jakub Józef Orliński is one of the most celebrated countertenors today. He has won international acclaim for his stage interpretations and recitals. In tonight’s concert,”Facce d’Amore” (The Faces of Love), he offers a rendering of the castrato’s, or countertenor’s, many guises accompanied by the acclaimed Baroque ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro. We will encounter heroes and antiheroes, and we will hear arias sung by a perverted emperor, a heroic officer, an insubordinate soldier, and many more or less lovesick princes.

Historically, we will cover a sixty-year period, from Giovanni Antonio Boretti’s Eliogabalo from 1668 to Luca Antonio Predieri’s Scipione i Giovane from 1731, right at the end of the Baroque period. The operas are generally set in the realm between myth and reality during the Roman Empire, although there are exceptions. “Ballo dei Bagatellieri”, an intermedio – a performance between the acts – by the Italian composer Nicola Matteis, forms part of Francesco Bartolomeo Conti’s opera Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena with a libretto based on Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Emotionally, the concert goes from tragedy to joy in a display of the musical diversity of the Baroque opera, from scintillating coloratura passages that show off the countertenor’s vocal range to languishing melodies.

Text: Bodil Hasselgren