Purcell / Finger / Eccles: Dido And Aeneas – Raffaella Milanesi

   in Early Music Today (Mar, 2017)
This account of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Æneas by Baroque orchestra La Risonanza under Fabio Bonizzoni is a hotch-potch but the CD’s other work, Eccles’s and Finger’s Venus and Mars, a revelation.

Instrumentally, the recording is a delight for its weightless string playing, tight, infectious rhythms and expressive idiomatic ornamentation. The chorus too, Coro Costanzo Porta, sings with bright tone, perfect intonation, shapely line, rhythmic discipline and meaningful dynamics, but attempts to pronounce the English as spurious research tells them was appropriate for Restoration England. This is hard enough for native speakers to achieve convincingly, but for mother-tongue Italians the task is almost hopeless. Everyone sounds like a West Country …