Antonia Bembo’s Ercole Amante Receives its First Recording

CPO’s release of Antonia Bembo’s 1707 opera L’Ercole Amante provides a rare document of a Venetian in the court of Louis XIV. The recording represents the first complete document of an operatic output that merged Italian melodic invention with the formal constraints of the French overture (a two-part musical form beginning with a slow section followed by a faster fugal section). Bembo's work survives because of the Sun King’s pension, a mechanism of patronage that allowed her to compose outside the commercial pressures of the Venetian public houses. This release, featuring Il Gusto Barocco under J$u00f6rg Halubek, reveals a score that treats the French declamatory style with a structural rigour usually reserved for Cavalli. Score on IMSLP.