ALESSANDRO STRADELLA (circa 1643 – 1682): Ester, liberatrice del popolo ebreo— Jessica Gould (Ester), Sonia Tedla (Speranza celeste), José Lemos (Mardocheo), Gabriele Lombardi (Aman), Salvo Vitale (Assuero), Anna Piroli (Una ebrea), Maria Dalia Albertini (Un’ ebrea, Testo – prima parte), Guglielmo Buonsanti (Testo – seconda parte); Camerata Grimani; Jory Vinikour, harpsichord, organ, and conductor [Recorded in Sala della Carità, Padova, Italy, in February 2023; Navona Records NV6629; 2 CDs, 78:22; Available from Salon Sanctuary Concerts (physical CD), Amazon (USA), Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and major music retailers and streaming services]
Though longer than a century passed between his death in 1682 and the births of Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Verdi, the alleged events of the final weeks of Alessandro Stradella’s life are tragically similar to the fatal clash of honor and debauchery in the play Le roi s’amuse and the opera that it inspired, Rigoletto. Believed to have seduced a lady of the house of Lomellini, a family influential enough to have produced Doges of Genova and commissioned a portrait by the Flemish master Antoon van Dyck, Stradella was rumored to have been murdered in retribution on orders from the kinsmen of the wronged woman. By the Nineteenth Century, Stradella’s work as a composer was largely overshadowed by salacious tales of his death, and his musical legacy was further obscured by the fleeting popularity of Friedrich von Flotow’s 1844 opera based upon a sanitized account of his amorous escapades. Stradella may never have expected his music to be remembered beyond his lifetime, but he would surely be disappointed by being known in the Twenty-First Century as much as a character in another composer’s work as the creator of his own.
Recorded in February 2023 in celebration of the 350th anniversary of the piece’s 1673 première, soprano Jessica Gould’s thoughtgully-prepared performance of Stradella’s oratorio Ester, liberatrice del popolo ebreo on Navona Records is the culmination of a serpentine journey from a random encounter with a neglected score to the gathering of a team of period-practice specialists in a suitable venue in Stradella’s native Italy. Just as Stradella may never have anticipated that Ester would spring back to life after three-and-a-half centuries, it could not have been foreseen during the sessions that produced this recording that avalanches of misogyny and anti-Semitism in subsequent months would lend heightened relevance to the biblical account of a Jewish woman called Hadassah becoming queen of the Persian empire and battling for the rights of the Hebrew people. Even in its Seventeenth-Century context, divorced from today’s calamities, Lelio Orsini’s libretto recounts Esther’s saga with tremendous emotional power. Despite the absence of music that is missing from the surviving manuscript, Stradella’s setting of the text achieves a high level of dramatic continuity, its heroine characterized with strikingly modern psychological depth.
Active during the final decades of the careers of Francesco Cavalli and Antonio Cesti, whose works he espoused, Stradella contributed significantly to the advancement of Italian music from the late-Renaissance style of Claudio Monteverdi to the High Baroque idioms of Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Caldara. The latter’s 1699 oratorio Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo—a bridge between Stradella’s work and Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans and Hãndel’s Esther, first performed in 1718—owes much to the form typified by Ester. Building upon the text-driven structure employed by composers of Monteverdi’s era, Stradella synthesized emotionally-charged recitative with both lyrical and bravura ariosi to give Ester a taut, fast-moving musical flow.
Extensive experience at the harpsichord and on the podium for performances of works like Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and Domenico Freschi’s Ermelinda is discernible in Jory Vinikour’s work in this traversal of Ester, both in his intuitive playing of harpsichord and organ continuo and in his spirited, inspiriting conducting of the performance. Owing to his innate affinity for pacing Stradella’s music with complementary interpretive freedom and rhythmic firmness, the recording constitutes a true performance of the oratorio rather than a disarticulated, studio-bound recital of the score’s musical numbers. Passages of gravitas are treated as the climaxes that they were undoubtedly meant to be, but every choice of tempo and dynamics is guided by historical authenticity. The greatest marvel of Vinikour’s leadership is the manner in which adherence to Seventeenth-Century practice is regarded as a catalyst, not a constraint. Under his stewardship, principals, chorus, and orchestra perform their parts with perceptible unity of purpose, Vinikour’s supportive direction encouraging his fellow artists not just to study but to feel Esther’s courage and Ester’s music.
Unwaveringly attentive to the nuances of Vinikour’s guidance, the playing of Camerata Grimani contributes markedly to the stylistic legitimacy of this traversal of Ester. Violinists Lorenzo Gugole and Diego Castelli and gambist Francesco Tomei (alternating between viola da gamba and violone in response to transitions in the music’s moods and sonic textures) execute their parts with dexterity of both technique and emotional engagement, their phrasing often elucidating the vividness of Stradella’s use of text. Lutenist Andrea Damiani is a skilled and intelligent partner for Vinikour in the continuo, employing the lute as a participant in the oratorio’s fateful exchanges. Harpist Marina Bonetti’s instrument and talents are similarly adapted to the subtleties of Stradella’s storytelling with inviolable musicality. Faithful to historical models and the composer’s scoring, the ensemble’s smallness facilitates intimacy, but Vinikour and the musicians ensure that neither power nor excitement is missing in passages of dramatic intensity.
Choral writing has lesser prominence and contrapuntal complexity in Ester than in Händel’s Esther, but Stradella’s music for chorus is sung in this performance with assurance and communicative clarity by soprano Anna Piroli, mezzo-sopranos Maria Dalia Albertini and Elena Biscuola, tenor Riccardo Pisani, and bass Gugluelmo Buonsanti. Many choral interjections in Ester are similar in structure to the motets that are prevalent in Monteverdi's operas and sacred works and are articulated here with near-perfect ensemble and verbal immediacy. In choruses and their respective scenes as Hebrew women, Piroli and Albertini sing alluringly, the latter joined by Buonsanti as scriptural narrators who animate text with deftly-managed vocal colorations. Despite its relative sparsity, Stradella’s music for chorus heightens his portrayal of Esther as a liberator of a populace whose deliverance is glorified with confident, compelling singing.
The care taken in assembling the cast for this recording is evident in the presence of countertenor José Lemos in the rôle of Mardocheo, Esther’s cousin and guardian Mordecai, an influential scion of the tribe of Benjamin who is reputed to have served in the Sanhedrin. Though the character appears only in the first of the oratorio’s two parts, Lemos crafts a portrayal rich with detail and substance, his sultry but rousingly masculine timbre imbuing Mardocheo’s utterances with urgency. Each word of recitative is sung with attention to its meaning, a trait that also permeates the singing of Lemos’s Ester colleagues. In this performance, the aria ‘Vanne ai piè del tuo Re’ rises from the preceding recitative with conversational naturalness despite being majestically voiced. The strength and beauty of Lemos’s lower register astonish in ‘Fia tuo vanto che si pieghi,’ the singer’s artistry wholly surrendered to the character’s sentiments.
Stradella’s incarnation of the Persian king Assuero—the historical Ahasuerus, whose union with Esther engendered the resolution of the conflict between Mordecai and Haman that imperiled the Jewish people—is enlivened by the galvanizing vocalism of bass Salvo Vitale. Like Mardocheo, Assuero is heard in only one of the oratorio’s parts, and, like Lemos, Vitale devotes palpable musical and dramatic focus to each line of his rôle. From the opening phrase of ‘Chiedi pur ciò che tu sai,’ Assuero’s constitution emerges from the singer’s keen pointing of words. Noble sensitivity is discernible in Vitale’s voicing of ‘Sgombra il duol dal tuo pensiero’, and his technical fluency projects an aura of regal authority in ‘Hor palesa a me, Regina.’ Musical portraiture reveals circumspection and inherent virtue in ‘Non dimorate più fulmini d’alto ciel,’ the inner contrasts of which are explored with grace and grit that impart the gravity of the king’s turmoil.
The bright, resonant voice of soprano Sonia Tedla appropriately illuminates Stradella’s music for Speranza Celeste with the warming glow of faithful optimism, fleet divisions allied with tonal radiance in all registers. Speranza Celeste is thus a genuine agent of providential favor rather than an allegorical figure akin to those who populate many contemporaneous operas and oratorios. In Ester’s first part, Tedla sings ‘Non disperate, no, bandite pur dal petto’ arrestingly, the voice’s top supported effortlessly and unerringly. ‘Un cor giusto non paventa’ is sculpted with unforced eloquence, but the soprano achieves still greater heights of musical splendor in Speranza’s superb duet with Aman, singing ‘Armati pur d’orgoglio’ thrillingly. Tedla’s performance of ‘Con speranza di riposo’ in the oratorio’s second part movingly conveys the profundity of feeling evoked by the composer’s word setting, the serenity of hope promulgated by the pellucid purity of the voice.
It is upon the shoulders of Aman, the Persian king’s vizier Haman, that Stradella placed many of Ester’s most daunting challenges, fashioning a depiction that transcends stock villainy. Bringing incredible insight to his survey of Aman’s motivations, baritone Gabriele Lombardi declaims Stradella’s vocal lines with operatic grandeur that never overwhelms the music or his fellow singers. The glinting steel in the voice glistens in ‘Dall’Indico all’Etiopico chi brama vivere’ and throughout Part One, yet ‘Piangete pur, piangete, o miser alme afflitte’ is voiced with elegance befitting a man of dangerous cunning. ‘Impossibile non fia a valore onnipotente’ receives from Lombardi a reading of unstinting force, the voice secure throughout the range. Aman’s words combating Speranza’s in their duet, the baritone catapults ‘Con suo fiero cordoglio’ with expert musical marksmanship.
In the oratorio’s second part, the insouciance of Lombardi’s singing of ‘Serba ad altro i tuoi favori’ discloses the magnetism of Aman’s treachery, and charismatic duplicity emanates from his impeccably-vocalized traversals of ‘Apprendete da me, o mortali superbi’ and ‘Mia Regina, a voi mi volgo.’ Stradella’s compositional genius for uniting words with music that amplifies their layers of meaning is especially apparent in ‘Questi piè che lagrimoso, infelice, miserabile’ and in Lombardi’s singing of it. Antagonists are often among music’s most fascinating characters but rarely sound as menacingly bewitching as Lombardi’s Aman.
The eponymous heroine of Ester might have been a Mutter Courage-esque caricature who recites platitudes rather than persuasively advocating for her people, but both Stradella and Jessica Gould portray her as a woman of moral and ethical rectitude, a determined, indomitable seeker of truth. There is in virtually every moment of Gould’s performance an engrossing air of visionary zeal: so unyielding is her commitment to lifting Ester out of the pages of Stradella’s score that vocal finesse becomes secondary to vibrant character development. In Part One, Gould’s Ester is a study in righteousness and self-reliance, ‘Su, dunque, a ferire’ limning a disquieting uncertainty that undulates in the vulnerability of her singing. From ‘E perché il mio Re’ courses exasperation with patriarchal social mores. Here, too, Gould pursues expressive directness rather than safer vocal poise.
As Ester metamorphoses into the consort who secures Assuero’s pardon for her Jewish brethren in the oratorio’s latter part, ‘Supplicante, è prostrata al tuo regale aspetto’ is voiced with pathos and dignity, the queen’s humility manifested in the simplicity of Gould’s approach. Integrity and gratefulness are the cornerstones of her singing of ‘S’agli occhi tuoi già mai,’ the words invested with significance that is both unmistakably personal and universal. Just as Ester conquers through graciousness, Gould triumphs through unapologetic openheartedness.
Modern scholars can only hypothesize about the extent to which Stradella may have hoped for his music to be known and performed after his death, but it is unlikely that any serious artist would hope to be remembered more for the manner of his death than for the work to which he devoted his life. Strides in the direction of renewed interest notwithstanding, Stradella’s music still hides in the shadows. Though not the work’s first recording, this performance proclaims that Ester slumbers in darkness no longer.