Bassani: La Morte Delusa. (Opera And Oratorio).(Giovanni Battista Bassani)(Sound Recording Review)

[] Galli, del Monaco; Jaroussky, Piolino, Sarragosse; La Fenice, Tubery. Text and translations. Opus 111 OP30332 9 (Harmonia Mundi, dist.)

While Giovanni Battista Bassani's oratorio La Morte Delusa is of dubious distinction musically, the performance on this recording provides an exciting window on the present state of instrumental early-music-making. Cornett-player Jean Tubery leads the small, seventeenth-century-practice band La Fenice with a virtuosity that outranks any of his singers. It is as if Maurice Andre had landed on an earlier planet. Tubery's playing is beautifully shaped, his color palette immense. He seems to have communicated these qualities to his fellow instrumentalists, which constitute a string-and-continuo band. The level of invention from Matthias Spaeter on archlute and Laurent Stewart and Sestien D'Herin on keyboards warrants many close listenings.

Invention is what it takes to bring this oratorio to life. Bassani wrote a number of attractive, if somewhat standard-issue, cantatas in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Although he composed several operas and oratorios as well, their manuscripts are virtually all lost. La Morte Delusa, a lucky survivor, was composed for the Academia della Morte, a musical society in Ferrara that was nearly a century old by the time Bassani was made its maestro in 1683. Bassani's composition relies on a high level of vocal virtuosity.

Besides the contralto Death herself, La Morte Delusa includes four other characters: Mercy (soprano), Glory (alto), Justice (tenor) and Lucifer (bass). The oratorio is a discussion among the five of the afterlife, written as a kind of homage to fallen warriors of the European victory over the Turks in 1683. Death is ...