Carlo Vistoli

Whether Paris, or London, Moscow, Venice, Berlin, Salzburg or Vienna – the Italian countertenor Carlo Vistoli guests regularly at the major opera houses of the world and has made an outstanding name for himself especially in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoire. In his cleverly compiled concert programmes, he focuses time and again also on unknown works, his virtuosic coloratura and tonal beauty breathing new life into long forgotten operatic heroes from the cradle of operatic history.

In the concert Opera Antica Carlo Vistoli and the Cappella Mediterranea under Leonardo Garcia-Alarcón take us to Italy of the mid-seventeenth century, where the still young genre of the opera was scaling its first summits of achievement. Composers like Monteverdi, Cesti, Cavalli and Stradella had hardly any existing traditions to latch onto and had to reinvent this innovative configuration of theatre, song, dance and music almost from scratch. The works yielded by this were to shape the history of music theatre permanently: in the cheerful “Ombra mai fu” from Cavalli’s Xerse or the yearning love lament “E pur io torno” from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, everything is germinated here that subsequent periods would reap as profound musical emotions. And when have we ever heard in later times such a dramatic, poignant and yet comedic madness scene as in Stradella’s comic opera Il Trespolo tutore?