FIOCCHI: Piramo e Tisbe.(Review)

FIOCCHI: Piramo e Tisbe [] Belfiore; Facini; La Magnifica Comunita, Correa. Text and translation. Bongiovanni GB 5105-2 (Qualiton, dist.)

Vincenzo Fiocchi (1767-1843) is not an important opera composer. While he spent the last fifty years of his life as an active musician in Paris, his principal contribution to music is his treatise of 1807 on the art of accompaniment in Italy. His little serenata Piramo e Tisbe should be interesting at least on the level of its orchestral setting of text. This recording was undertaken by a period orchestra, many of whose players were schooled in the best institutions in Europe for the study of period style. Fiocchi's style lies squarely between early Mozart and Boccherini. It is pleasant, occasional music. (Though the occasion for which Piramo was composed is not known, its date is thought to be in the first decade of the nineteenth century.) The cantata opens with an eleven-minute overture in sonata form, the most weighty of the numbers. Fiocchi zooms in on Ovid's tale after the hapless episodes of communication through a wall that are the source of so much ribaldry in ...