Caccini : L’Euridice. Zanassi, Frigato, Alessandrini.

   in Opera Now (Jul, 2014)
The producer of the first Euridice – Jacopo Peri’s, at the marriage of Maria de’ Medici in 1600 – reported the event as ‘tedious … like the chanting of a Passion’, and reported ‘boredom and irritation’ among the visiting Roman clergy. This is not Peri’s but Giulio Caccini’s version, written a couple of years later, but since Caccini claimed to have written much of Peri’s opera it’s pretty similar. And despite the best endeavours of Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano in this live performance from the Innsbruck Early Music Festival you can’t really call it edge-of- the-seat stuff. You can have the twangliest continuo section in the world but it cannot …