Home listening - reimagining Mozart’s operatic career

The Guardian 0

Raphaël Pichon weaves a postmodern tapestry, and Iestyn Davies teams up with James Hall

• Even great composers go through tricky patches. In the period before the great trilogy of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosí, Mozart became stuck on several projects that remained unfinished but contain some superb surviving music. His incomplete operas L’oca del Cairo and Lo sposo deluso have now been woven into a sort of postmodern tapestry in three scenes by the ingenious Raphaël Pichon with his ensemble Pygmalion on Libertà! (Harmonia Mundi). Magpie-like, Pichon also draws on Mozart’s contemporaries in Vienna, Paisiello, Martín y Soler (the piece that’s quoted in Don Giovanni’s final supper) and Salieri (a comic ensemble that’s a winner). Each tableau starts with a strong overture, the last being a fizzing account of Der Schauspieldirektor, and two finish with calm nocturnes. There’s room for concert arias at which the French soprano Sabine Devieilhe excels, arrangements of domestic canons, and while the logic of the whole may not be purist, it’s totally ingenious and brilliantly delivered.

• The present generation of countertenors is outstanding, and on a new collection called Elegy (Vivat), Iestyn Davies and newcomer James Hall partner in famous duets by Purcell and John Blow. Worthy successors to James Bowman and Michael Chance, who also recorded these duets with the King’s Consort, Davies and Hall bring a chamber-music intensity to Blow’s sublime elegy on Purcell’s death, though nothing on the disc quite beats the spine-tingling last bars of Purcell’s duet O dive custos. Davies adds some solos, but though we’re told who plays which recorder, it is oddly not revealed exactly who sings what.