In dolce amore: Arias and Cantatas by Antonio Caldara

Abstract

This disc is a debut for soprano Robin Johannsen and composer Antonio Caldara alike. For her first solo CD, Johannsen (European launch 2002) gives us previously unrecorded arias by Caldara (1671–1736). The program shows the soprano to dazzling advantage, the composer less so. At its best, Johannsen’s performance whets our appetite for Caldara’s meatier compositions that have previously been recorded. Recognition of Caldara’s genius is overdue. He was the Verdi of the Baroque, turning poetry into profound drama for solo singers. Son of a gigging violinist in Venice, Caldara had access to the three epicentres of early Baroque musical experimentation: the Basilica of St. Mark’s, Venice's music academies, and the first commercial opera houses. Like many Italian musicians, Caldara made a career in the church—he was an alto singer at St Mark’s—even as he cultivated virtuosity in secular repertoire, initially as a cellist. By the age of twenty-eight he was master of the Baroque era’s major vocal and instrumental genres, and of the art of synthesizing their respective compositional techniques. After moving to Rome in 1707, he competed with Corelli, Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti for patrons. Artistically, during his Roman years Caldara forged a bold expressiveness within balanced poetic forms, first in Arcadian cantatas and, from 1715, in oratorio, a genre he revolutionized.1 Pragmatically, from 1708 Caldara wooed the Habsburgs, the political enemies of his Italian patrons, smoothing the way to his last appointment, in 1716, as vice-Kapellmeister at the imperial court in Vienna. Here, where Emperor Charles VI had gathered an outstanding retinue of vocalists and instrumentalists, Caldara realized some of his greatest compositions, in sacred music especially.