Pergolesi: LOlimpiade – De Marchi

Twenty-six years old and dying of tuberculosis in a monastery outside Naples, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi could not have known that his comic maid would outlive nearly everything else he wrote, and outlive his own reputation too, since half of what circulated under his name for the next century was somebody else’s counterfeit. L’Olimpiade is the real thing, composed the year before he died. It deserves better than the footnote status it has occupied since musicology got around to sorting the fakes from the genuine.

Metastasio’s libretto is preposterous and wonderful in roughly equal measure. Disguised princes, a hero who competes in the Olympic games under a false name to win the hand of a woman promised to his best friend, a father-daughter recognition scene that arrives about four scenes too late to prevent maximum anguish: this is opera seria doing what opera seria did before Gluck, and then Mozart, taught it some manners. Composers lined up for decades to set this text. The tally runs past sixty by some counts, which tells you everything about how singers, not stories, sold tickets in the 1730s and beyond.

What struck me first here is how much orchestra Pergolesi commits to a genre that, in lesser hands of the period, treats the band as glorified accompaniment. Strings dig in with real bite, winds get actual color rather than doubling duty, and there’s a nervous, forward-leaning quality to the string writing that anticipates Mozart’s own opera seria manner by four decades. Whoever conducts this from the Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini’s forces — the notes credit period practice throughout, gut strings audibly a touch under today’s brighter pitch — keeps textures lean without draining the harmonic tension out of the recitative, which in this rep is where the real drama happens, not in the da capo arias people remember.

Raúl Giménez, a tenor whose Rossini credentials go back decades, sings Clistene with unforced elegance. There’s a slight fraying at the very top now. Inevitable, and honestly it suits a king weighed down by an old crime he doesn’t yet know he’s committed. Lyubov Petrova’s Aristea has the brighter, more agile instrument, coloratura tossed off with a kind of unbothered accuracy that never curdles into showing off. Her long slow aria in Act II — the sort of piece Pergolesi seems to have designed purely to break your heart before intermission — has real breath control and, more importantly, real rhetorical shape, each repeated phrase weighted differently. Yetzabel Arias Fernández’s Argene is the find of the cast for me: a voice with grain in it, some darkness at the bottom that most Argenes don’t bring, used to suggest a woman whose devotion has curdled into something closer to obsession.

None of the three, it should be said, is working with a role that offers much psychological development in Mozart’s sense. Metastasio’s people announce their feelings; they don’t discover them. That’s a limitation of the genre, not the reading, and singers of this quality mostly paper over it through sheer vocal characterization.

The staging problem, which anyone attempting this repertoire runs into immediately, gets a pragmatic non-solution here: minimal sets, and the singers left largely to their own devices in a hall — the Teatro Valeria Moriconi — that photographs (on video, presumably; I’m working from the audio) better than it probably functions for blocking six principals through three acts of entrances, exits, and mistaken identities. On disc, none of that matters. What matters is whether the continuo team keeps recitative alive. It mostly does, with harpsichord chords voiced with unusual sensitivity to the Italian text’s natural stresses. And whether the arias, structurally repetitive by design, get enough variety of ornamentation on the repeats to justify their length: mostly yes, though a couple of Clistene’s slower numbers could use another degree of rhythmic freedom.

Compared with the handful of existing recordings — a decent one led by Vincenzo La Scola years back, plus scattered concert performances that circulated privately — this Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini account has the advantage of scholarly seriousness behind it, an organization whose whole reason for existing is untangling the composer’s actual output from the junk attributed to him. That matters for a piece this obscure. You want to trust the edition you’re hearing.

Is L’Olimpiade a masterpiece on the order of La Serva Padrona‘s comic perfection? No, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a young, extravagantly gifted composer working at the top of a dying convention, three years before the convention itself started to look old-fashioned even to contemporaries. But there are individual arias here, Aristea’s especially, that make you wonder what Pergolesi might have written at forty. This album won’t convert listeners who find opera seria’s da capo architecture maddening. For everyone else, it’s a persuasive, well-sung case for a work that has waited a long time for its moment.