Il Soave E Bel Contento: Belcanto Rarities – Francesco Santoli

According to many scholars, in Italy the early nineteenth century is qualified as the historical period when opera undisputedly prevailed. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one notices that a typically nineteenth-century genre such as the chamber music song may recall the cantabile sections of the most seductive of the operatic arias, adapting itself to the dynamics of fruition of theatrical shows. This is the context evoked by Il soave e bel contento, a collection of compositions in the name of refinement and a homage to a specific vocal aesthetics. The work behind it is in fact the fruit of a synthesis. By joining the careful study of the score to the impassionate rediscovery of contemporaneous sources, this work aims at reviving a performance approach, one that should be as close as possible to period performance practice and should reveal the multifaceted expressive possibilities of the tenor voice. On the other hand, the very choice of the repertoire suggests the adoption of a timbre suited for highlighting the figure of the “sfogato” tenor. This is a specific voice type, particularly in vogue between the Twenties and Thirties of the nineteenth century. Especially in the operas by Rossini and Bellini, the role of the loving youth/nobleman was assigned to this voice type.
Regarding this, it is interesting to notice that a red thread runs through the entire programme (within which true rarities are found). That thread allows us to glimpse a net of relationships among events and characters linked to the genesis of the lyrics. Most of the works are in fact connected to the great tenors of the era, whose vocality is linked, in turn, to that mentioned above. We pass therefore from operatic and concert arias which were purposefully conceived with specific voices in mind (such as those of Giovanni David and Giovanni Battista Rubini), to chamber songs dedicated to particular singers (such as Adolphe Nourrit) and, eventually, to examples of musical works composed by some of those same interpreters.