Antonio Vivaldi, Orlando Furioso 1714

Orlando : Riccardo Novaro BARITONO
Alcina : Romina Basso MEZZO-SOPRANO
Bradamante : Gaëlle Arquez SOPRANO
Astolfo : Roberta Mameli SOPRANO
Medoro : Delphine Galou CONTRALTO
Ruggiero : David DQ Lee CONTROTENORE
Angelica : Teodora Gheorghiu SOPRANO

Modo Antiquo | Federico Maria Sardelli CONDUCTOR

RV 819 / The rediscovery of a new Vivaldi opera!

Orlando furioso is Vivaldi’s most famous operas, dating from 1727 . . . But today, the specialists of the Venetian composer’s catalogue are able to reveal that Vivaldi actually composed another Orlando furioso thirteen years earlier!
In 1714, an Orlando scored a huge success at the Teatro San Angelo in Venice, whose directors were none other than Vivaldi and his father. The manuscript of this opera was rediscovered 250 years later in Vivaldi’s personal library, now in Turin, but no composer was named on it. It was then thought to be a revision of an existing Orlando furioso written in 1713 by the young Bolognese composer Ristori.

But that was without counting on the sharp eyes of the musicologists in charge of the numbering of the works of Vivaldi, Peter Ryom and his successor Federico Maria Sardelli. They wondered why Vivaldi should have kept this music in his personal corpus among all his other scores, and noticed that the manuscript featured many different hands and numerous pasted-in corrections of the parts. Sardelli therefore decided to subject the music to meticulous examination and observed obvious similarities between the arias of this Orlando and those of the first two operas of which Vivaldi was the official composer. His intuition was confirmed by the analyses of Reinhard Strohm, the leading expert on eighteenth-century opera, and the entire musicological community: this music is definitely by Vivaldi!

So this Orlando furioso of 1714 now achieves a new lease of life under a catalogue number that has just been assigned to it: RV 819. Only two acts have survived. Orlando is sung by a baritone, unlike the 1727 version.

“Almost two years have gone by since I began work on the rediscovery of this Orlando. It is with great pride that we are now able to present the world with a new opera by Vivaldi: a precious, powerfully expressive work, a testimony to his first period of operatic composition, and a reservoir of great ideas for the future.” -- F.M. Sardelli