FULL SAN GIOVANNI BATTISTA (Stradella) Houston TX 2019

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: SAN GIOVANNI BATTISTA  
• Composer: Stradella Alessandro   
• Libretto:
• Venue & Opera Company: Zilkha Hall / Hobby Center For The Performing Arts, Houston, Texas  
• Recorded: March 30, 2019
• Type: Concert Live
• Singers: Jay Carter, Sherezade Panthaki, Sam Handley, Sydney Anderson, Joseph Gaines, Sonja Bruzauskas, Kathleen Ruhleder, Alexander Scheuermann, Christopher Besch
• Conductor: Elizabeth Blumenstock  
• Orchestra: Ars Lyrica  
• Chorus: Ars Lyrica  
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Ars Lyrica Houston  
• Date Published: 2019  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  This 1675 oratorio tells the story of the death of John the Baptist with great flair and vivid drama. The prodigiously gifted Italian composer Alessandro Stradella took no prisoners in life or in art: his vocal lines, by turns acrobatic and deeply expressive, resemble his brief but spectacular career. Our cast for this performance, the Houston premiere of San Giovanni Battista, includes counter-tenor Jay Carter in the title role, soprano Sherezade Panthaki as Herodiade, tenor Joseph Gaines as Consigliero, and bass-baritone Sam Handley as Herod.

  PROGRAM NOTES & SYNOPSIS
  For many years the lurid end to Alessandro Stradella’s brief life was all the world knew
  about this talented composer. Assassinated at forty-two for reasons that remain murky,
  Stradella quickly became one of music history’s most sensational figures: he was said to
  have survived an earlier attempt at murder because his music charmed the goons sent
  to kill him. Though picaresque fantasy, this legend has proved persistent and was only
  disproved recently. In the end, Stradella’s lack of judgment was his undoing. In the
  seventeenth century musicians could get away with embezzling money from the
  church, but they were not supposed to have affairs with the mistresses of powerful
  men.
  Born in 1639 into a family of minor aristocrats south of Rome, Stradella took up
  residence in the Eternal City by the mid 1650s, where he gained entrée into various
  noble households. A gifted composer and fluent courtier, he nevertheless avoided
  permanent service with any of Rome’s illustrious families, preferring to collect
  independent commissions for works in all the major genres of his day, from sonatas to
  operas. His striking and original compositional voice found many admirers, including
  the Colonna and Chigi families plus Queen Christina of Sweden, whose sumptuous
  Roman exile fostered many musical careers.
  Stradella’s musical achievements are many and varied. He pioneered the concerto grosso
  texture, in which a “concertino” group of soloists (typically two violins plus cello) are
  set against the “ripieno,” a larger ensemble of strings. His similarly inventive vocal
  textures include highly virtuosic stretches of recitative and arias with concerto grossostyle scoring. With over three hundred works to his credit, including six operas and six
  oratorios, Stradella was among the most productive composers of his generation.
  In 1675 his good connections brought a highly desirable commission from the
  Confraternity of the Florentines in Rome, for an oratorio about St John the Baptist,
  patron saint of Florence and thus a crucial figure for this organization. Set to a libretto
  by one of the confraternity’s favorites, poet and canon Ansaldo Ansaldi, San Giovanni
  Battista treats the Biblical story of John the Baptist, Herod, and Herod’s daughter
  Salome. As told in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, John the Baptist comes to Herod
  to demand that this Roman King of Judea renounce the wife he took from his own
  brother, since that marriage violated Jewish law. Herodias and her daughter Salome
  have other ideas, however; they convince Herod to imprison John the Baptist and then
  to kill him.

  Salome proves the decisive character in both Ansaldi’s libretto and Oscar Wilde’s play
  (the basis for Richard Strauss’s opera). Seeking to ingratiate herself at Herod’s court,
  Salome dances lasciviously before him on his birthday. Half-mad with desire for his
  step-daughter, Herod rashly promises whatever she wants as payment. At her mother’s
  urging, Salome asks for the Baptist’s head on a platter.
  The Biblical accounts both end here, with no further word about Herod or Salome. In
  Strauss’s Salome, by contrast, the title character herself is the next victim; she dies on
  Herod’s orders. Stradella’s oratorio concludes enigmatically, with a delighted Salome
  and an anguished Herod questioning their respective motivations on an unresolved
  dominant chord.

  San Giovanni Battista reflects its time and place in its scoring for five principal singers,
  who probably also functioned as the “chorus of disciples,” plus a string orchestra
  divided into a small concertino group of two violins and continuo against the larger
  ensemble. The work found admirers far and wide during the eighteenth century
  especially, from the Italian theorist Padre Martini to George Frideric Handel, who
  owned a copy. This performance is the oratorio’s Texas premiere.
  © Matthew Dirst

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