This concert celebrates Opera Fuoco’s latest recoding and featuring three former members of Opera Fuoco’s Young Artists Studio and the Opera Fuoco orchestra conducted by David Stern. Berenice is a compilation of late baroque and early Classical works based principally on Metastasio’s famous 18th-century opera scene « Ah Berenice » from his opera Antigono.
Not only was the scene set to music by such composers as Haydn and Hasse, but also by Antonio Maria Mazzoni and Marianna Martinez, a composer of Spanish descent who was widely connected to the Viennese music scene and, for a time, lived in the same noble house as Metastasio and Haydn at Grosse Michelstrasse. The young Mozart’s concert aria « Berenice » and Johann Christian Bach’s aria « Confusa, smarrita» from the composer’s lost pasticcio opera, Berenice, as well as Hasse’s Antigono overture complement the program.
Contrary to the claims of the reference edition, Hercules is not an oratorio. Handel always wanted it to be considered a musical drama, and thus an opera in English. In order to reinforce the dramatic tension and to give Hercules its operatic colors, David Stern proposes an interpretation based on the original manuscript and the reworkings that Handel made in 1749 and 1752.