Francesco Cavalli: L’Ormindo – Les Paladins – Correas

   in Opera Now (Apr, 2015)
Another relative rarity is Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, a re-release from 2006 that is well engineered and cast. Jerome Correas conducts Les Paladins, and extracts as much colour as Cavalli’s minimal but sometimes exotic scoring allows. His singers follow suit. Sandrine Piau gets things off to a flying start as L’Armonia, her fluting soprano weaving through the high lying tessitura of the prologue. The rest of the singers are accomplished but not called upon to provide such pyrotechnics. Martin Oro’s countertenor Ormindo and Howard Crook’s tenor Amida are relatively low key. As Nerillo, Dominque Visse’s countertenor isn’t a thing of beauty, but he maximises the potential of the text and teeters on the …