Vinci Artaserse – A Landmark Opera Restored

Leonardo Vinci died at 34, probably poisoned — the story goes that a jealous husband was responsible — and the loss to music was incalculable. He had already written some two dozen operas in the decade before his death in 1730, and Artaserse, premiered in Rome that very year with a cast of celebrated castrati, stands as his farewell to a world he had done more than almost anyone to shape. The opera seria as Handel knew it, as Vivaldi practiced it, as the young Hasse was just beginning to master — Vinci was at the center of all of it, and the historical record has not been kind to his reputation.

Which makes this disc something close to an act of justice.

The libretto is Metastasio at his most labyrinthine — court intrigue, filial loyalty tested to its breaking point, love entangled with political survival. Artaserse, the Persian prince who becomes king mid-drama, is the emotional anchor, and Philippe Jaroussky carries that weight with a combination of technical command and interpretive intelligence that you simply don’t hear very often. His voice has always had a particular quality in the upper register — a kind of luminous, almost crystalline compression — and here he uses it with restraint that makes the moments of release genuinely thrilling. When the line opens up, you feel it.

Max Emanuel Cenic as Mandane is a revelation. I had encountered him in earlier work and thought him promising. Promising doesn’t cover it anymore. His Arbace — tremendous, the breath control in the long phrases almost startling — suggests a singer who has arrived at full maturity somewhere between the last recording and this one.

Daniel Behle’s Artabano is another matter, and I mean that as a compliment. The tenor voice in this repertoire always carries a slightly different dramatic charge than the counter-tenors surrounding it — grittier, more anchored in the physical world — and Behle exploits that contrast shrewdly. His villain is never cartoonish. There’s a kind of wounded logic to the man.

The score itself rewards close attention. Vinci’s harmonic language is simpler than Handel’s — less chromatic, less architecturally dense — but his melodic gift is extraordinary, and his understanding of the voice as a vehicle for emotional truth was arguably more refined than his more famous contemporaries. His arias breathe differently. The accompaniments rarely compete with the singer; they support, they illuminate, they get out of the way at exactly the right moment. That’s not a small thing.

What keeps this recording from being merely admirable and makes it genuinely important is the accumulated conviction of everyone involved. These performers know what this music is, where it comes from, what it requires. There’s no condescension in their approach — no sense that they’re rescuing a curiosity for the benefit of musicologists. They’re playing it like it matters, because it does.

Vinci deserves to be spoken of alongside Handel and Vivaldi. Full stop. This recording makes that case better than any other I know.