PHAEDRA
Cantata
Music byBenjamin Britten
Own libretto by Racine
A new production by Fondazione Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova
Phaedra
Giulia Alletto / Greta Carlino
Piano
Giuseppe Ottaviani
Harpsichord
Umberto Musso
Director
Fabio Sparvoli
GIOVANNA D’ARCO
Cantata
Music by Gioachino Rossini
Libretto by unknown author
Giovanna d’Arco
Giulia Alletto / Greta Carlino
Piano
Giuseppe Ottaviani
Phaedra is a cantata for mezzo-soprano, small orchestra and harpsichord (or mezzo-soprano and harpsichord) composed by Benjamin Britten in 1975. The first performance was held at the Aldeburgh Festival on 16 June 1976, with Jane Baker playing the lead. For the text, Britten reworked Robert Lowell’s English translation of Racine’s tragedy of the same name (from 1677), itself taken from the classical texts of Euripides and Seneca. Phaedra, an intense and controversial heroine, takes her own life following the rejection of Hippolytus, her stepson, with whom she was in love. The linear plot is structured by Britten according to the canons of the Baroque cantata, which involved alternating arias and recitatives, with Phaedra as the sole protagonist and thus a focus on her complex psychology. The Baroque style is taken up in the musical writing, but combined with the use of contemporary compositional techniques and timbre choices. The vocal line reaches peaks of great impact, in the expression of the anger and passion that characterise the protagonist. Some of the first performers were astonished by the vibrant emotional charge of Phaedra, especially considering the serious health condition Britten was in at the time.
Giovanna d’Arco is a cantata for solo voice and piano that Gioachino Rossini composed in Paris in 1832, to a text by an unknown author, with a dedication to his future wife Olimpia Pélissier. For a few years, Rossini had abandoned operatic production, devoting himself instead to more intimate compositions to be performed in circumscribed contexts and for small circles of friends. The cantata, in its classic structure Recitative – Aria – Recitative – Aria, sees the protagonist reflecting on her political mission: on the one hand there is the intimist dimension of nostalgia for her family (which emerges in the first recitative “É notte, e tutto addormentato è il mondo” and in the aria “O mia madre”), on the other the impetus and desire to face battle and conquer victory (“Ah, la fiamma che t’esce dal guardo già mi tocca, m investe, già m’arde”). With this composition, it is possible that Rossini wanted to pay homage to his second homeland, Paris, and in particular to those closest to him, precisely through an intense and moving portrayal of one of the greatest figures in French history. There are two orchestral versions of the cantata, the first edited by Salvatore Sciarrino for the 1989 Rossini Opera Festival, the second by Marco Taralli for the 2011 Rossini in Wildbad Festival.
