Handel’s opera has had at least nine recordings, and I devoted a few enthusiastic paragraphs to it in my book Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart. The libretto by Piovene will be largely familiar to devoted lovers of Baroque opera, because Handel used it for his powerful opera Tamerlano (London, 1719). Suitable numbers from operas of the period (four arias by Vivaldi and one by Giacomelli) have been inserted in this recording, with the texts from Tamerlano underlaid hypothetically. The surviving score in the Turin library, mainly in Vivaldi’s hand, also contains numerous new arias by Vivaldi (that is, in addition to the eight reused ones by him), but lacks music for five arias that we know were sung at the performances. The composers whose preexisting arias we know are incorporated here include Vivaldi himself (8), Giacomelli and Hasse (3 each: Giacomelli actually composed the “Sposa” aria mentioned above), Riccardo Broschi (2), as well as one by Porpora that ended up being replaced. But recent performances have demonstrated that a well-constructed pasticcio can work just as effectively as one entirely composed from scratch. The practice was long derided by music historians and critics, obsessed by Romantic-era notions of originality and composerly authority. The aim, often, was to allow certain scheduled singers to display their special gifts.
This opera is a “pasticcio”: one in which the composer-in-charge (here Vivaldi) brought together arias from previous operas by himself or someone else and stitched them together as necessary, usually with new arias of his own and new recitatives. Either way, the work is, in Ryom’s numbering, RV703. A download-only recording, by Pinchgut Opera (Australia, less widely distributed) is likewise entitled Bajazet. The Biondi recording retitled the work Bajazet.
A previous recording under the remarkable Fabio Biondi was welcomed by record critics, and some arias (e.g., Irene’s “Sposa, son disprezzata”) have also been recorded separately by such fine singers as Cecilia Bartoli. Marina De Liso (Andronico), Arianna Vendittelli (Idaspe), Sophie Rennert (Irene), Delphine Galou (Asteria), Filippo Mineccia (Tamerlano), Bruno Taddia (Bajazet).Īccademia Bizantina, conducted by Ottavio Dantone.Īttentive collectors may already own a recording of this opera, a work concocted by Vivaldi for Carnival season in Verona, 1735. Vivaldi put this opera together using, in part, arias associated with two famous singers: the “Moorish” (i.e., half-African) Vittorio Tesi and the castrato Farinelli.
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