“L’Egisto is the opera that features the greatest of madnesses,” writes Vincent Dumestre, the mastermind behind this fabulous recording of Cavalli’s favola drammatica musicale in a prologue and three acts to a libretto by the composer’s great collaborator, Giovanni Faustini.
Cavalli was also fortunate in having had a great teacher, Claudio Monteverdi, in whose footsteps he would follow. Indeed Cavalli, born in Crema in 1602, would learn early the expressive possibilities of the human voice as a boy soprano at St Mark’s Basilica and go on to become the leading opera composer of the mid-17th century, penning over 40 works for the stage before his death in 1676.
Cavalli’s acknowledged masterpieces include La Calisto, Giasone, Ercole amante and L’Ormindo. But L’Egisto, the score of which Dumestre discovered in the Biblioteca Marciana 12 years ago (it is part of the extraordinary Contarini collection containing nearly all of Cavalli’s 33 operas; the scores were given to Count Marco Contarini by Cavalli’s widow, Maria)...
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