Facce d'amore, "Faces of love" follows Jakub Józef Orliński's first solo album, Anima Sacra, which moved Gramophone magazine to announce that "This is a voice with a big future", and The Sunday Times, having extolled the "the unearthly beauty of Orliński's tone, his pearly coloratura and fabulous breath control", to say, "He's only 28, but this is a special voice to look out for". It brings a switch from the sacred to the personal and passionate. As the Polish-born, New York-trained countertenor says, the programme – which includes eight world premiere recordings – comprises "operatic arias that tell a story, showing a musical picture of a male lover in the baroque era – not only the positive side, like joyful or reciprocated love, but also anger or even madness". Spanning some 85 years of the baroque period, the arias on Facce d'amore are by Handel, Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Bononcini, Conti, Hasse, Orlandini, Predieri and Matteis. Orliński is again partnered by the instrumentalists of Il Pomo d'Oro and their Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev.
The new album brings a switch from the sacred to the personal and passionate. As the Polish-born, New York-trained singer explains: "On Anima Sacra I wanted to take listeners on a spiritual journey through an entire programme based on sacred music of the 18th century. The idea behind Facce d’amore is a bit different".
The programme – which includes an impressive eight world premiere recordings – comprises "operatic arias that tell a story, showing a musical picture of a male lover in the baroque era. They focus on totally different aspects of love – not only the positive side, like joyful or reciprocated love, but also the side where the characters are possessed by anger or even madness".
The album, which spans some 85 years of the baroque period, includes arias by major figures like Handel, Cavalli and Alessandro Scarlatti, by composers whose names have regained currency over recent decades, like Bononcini, Conti and Hasse (who wrote the virtuosic "Sempre a si vaghi rai" – one of the album's world premieres – for the legendary castrato Farinelli), and by relatively obscure names like Orlandini, Predieri and Matteis. As for Anima Sacra, the bass-baritone Yannis François advised on the conception and compilation of the programme for Facce d'amore, while Orliński's performance partners are again the instrumentalists of Il Pomo d'Oro and their Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev.
A great deal has happened in Jakub Józef Orliński's career since the release of Anima Sacra, which has taken his name around the world. The New Yorker magazine has summed him up with the headline "A millennial countertenor's pop-star appeal", while his assumption of the title role in Handel's Rinaldo at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in August 2019 led the Financial Times to write that: "Jakub Józef Orliński is the new countertenor on the block. In the short time that he was been singing at the top level he has matured at speed and his Rinaldo is the number one reason for catching this run of performances".
Source: prestomusic.com
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“Facce d'amore”
Giovanni Battista Bononcini (1670-1747), Giovanni Antonio Boretti (1640-1672), Pietro Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676), Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (1682-1732), George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783), Nicola Matteis (1670s-1760), Giovanni Maria Orlandini (c.1675-1760), Luca Antonio Predieri (1688-1767), Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725)
Jakub Józef Orliński, countertenor
Il pomo d'Oro
Conductor: Maxim Emelyanchev
Recorded at Villa San Fermo, Lonigo, Italy, on March 15-21, 2019
Released on November 8, 2019 by Erato/Warner Classics
I could never have imagined that someday I would have the opportunity to record a solo album. So I was thrilled that, after all the years of various musical adventures and experiences, Warner Classics & Erato gave me this chance. I am grateful to them for believing in me and supporting my ideas. From the very beginning, when I had finally processed the fact I would be making a recording, I told the Warner team I wanted an album of mine to mean something to me. I wanted there to be various ideas, plotlines and stories behind the music selected for each programme. I wanted the album to make sense as a unified whole. It was thus that after almost a year and a half working with Yannis François (my researcher), Il Pomo d’Oro and Maxim Emelyanychev, we released my first solo album, Anima Sacra.
For Facce d'amore, my second solo album, I wanted to extend the collaboration I had so enjoyed with the whole team from Anima Sacra. So Yannis is again our researcher, and Maxim leads Il Pomo d'Oro once more for this new recording.
On Anima Sacra I had wanted to take listeners on a spiritual journey based on sacred music from the 18th century. The idea behind Facce d'amore is a bit different.
The programme is filled with operatic arias I selected together with Yannis. Through the music on this album I want to tell a story and present the musical picture of a male lover in the baroque era. The arias here focus on various aspects of being in love: not just the positive side, like joyful or reciprocated love, but the side where characters are possessed by anger, even madness, as depicted in the portrayal of Nero, for example. In addition to exploring this spectrum of emotional experiences in love, Facce d'amore takes us on a gradual journey through the baroque era: starting with compositions by F. Cavalli, G.A. Boretti; going through G. Bononcini, F.B. Conti, G.F. Handel and L.A. Predieri; and finishing with a virtuosic love aria sung by Orfeo, composed for the famous castrato Farinelli by J.A. Hasse.
Anima Sacra featured a number of world-premiere recordings, and I wanted to continue this exploration and revival of forgotten pieces. Thanks then to Yannis for the programme of Facce d'amore, which offers a balance between well-known baroque arias like Handel's "Pena tiranna" from Amadigi di Gaula or "Voi che udite" from Agrippina and lesser-known pieces like Conti's "Odio, vendetta, amore" from Don Chisciotte, Bononcini's "Infelice mia costanza" from La costanza non gradita, and includes world premieres like the concluding aria by Hasse for Farinelli.
I am pleased and grateful for the fantastic reception Anima Sacra received. As a newcomer to the recording industry I must say I was anxious about that release.
Now it's with a bit more confidence that I share with you another side to my personality: that of a lover – and with so many different shades of love.
Jakub Józef Orliński
When Jakub Józef Orliński let it be known that he'd like an interview with his consultant musicologist Yannis François to accompany this album, he wasn't just being modest. François – who seems to carousel multiple careers as bass-baritone, dancer and musical detective – was the brains behind Orliński's previous album, Anima Sacra, and was again recruited for Facce d'amore. "We started with Jakub saying that he'd really love to record two specific Cavalli arias and two of the Handel arias", he says. "So I had to construct a theme and all the rest from those".
"All four of the arias Jakub wanted (in the end we only kept three) were about love. That gave me the idea for an album featuring different sides of love – the weeping lover, the one who loves two women simultaneously, the one who is betrayed, even the abusive lover, and this period of opera could give us a melting-pot of different aspects of love. So: Facce d'amore – Faces of Love."
François set his sights on eight and a half decades of early Italian opera, which comprised, he repeatedly says, a dauntingly long period to try and span.
("These composers were the pioneers! They were inventing and reinventing all the time – in that era things changed so much and so often that 80-plus years is such a mélange of styles and innovations.") Nevertheless, it does offer a satisfying gallery of vastly different approaches to the subject of love.
And Italian? The language of love, I ask? "It's a very interesting subject", he shoots back, with delight. "I actually adore German, but when these operas were written, Italian was indeed considered the language of love. In Hamburg and Dresden, for instance, they would even have bilingual operas – the recitatives would be in German and maybe also some of the lighter arias, but when the deep, profound arias about love came round, the language would often switch to Italian!"
The album begins with the La Calisto aria by Cavalli. It's a dazzling piece of vocal writing. "People tend to say that the beginning of opera is Monteverdi", explains François, "but while he borrowed the clothes of Greek tragedy, Cavalli was one of those who started to turn opera into entertainment, with beautiful melodies and exploring the ranges and colours of the voice and orchestra".
Cavalli was enormously influential, not least on Handel, but there were lesser-known names (at least to us, today) François was keen to share. "I'd found some operas by Giovanni Antonio Boretti and – wow, I was so impressed!" he enthuses. "Here was writing that was so virtuosic, I couldn't get enough of him! We had to include him here. Even if the arias we chose are with basso continuo and aren't crazy virtuosic or especially innovative, they fit the atmosphere of the album perfectly."
Giovanni Bononcini has a slightly higher profile, which François puts down to his rivalry with Handel in London. "Some people still know the name of Bononcini", he says, "but still, he was such a prolific composer, and few people hear much of his amazing work".
Several of these composers were successful string instrument players in their day. Nicola Matteis, for instance, was a highly influential violinist, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti a master of the mandolin. I wonder if this is evident in their own operatic output, and whether a certain "strings" quality from them helped to create the famous lyricism of Italian opera? "Not exactly", he demurs, "because in baroque opera it was the instrument that was supposed to imitate the voice rather than the other way around. And I can't say either that string player composers had something more special than the others – Handel was a master of voice and vocal line, and he was an organist! But composers often highlighted the instrument they themselves played. Conti wrote a lot with solo mandolin or solo theorbo; Johann Mattheson wrote crazily difficult arias for tenor because he was a tenor himself! But these composers studied so many instruments: you can even find psalterion in some operas".
Mention of Mattheson – a German-born composer – begs the question, what (or who) was an Italian opera composer in this period, anyway? "Geography was more fluid between the composers in this period", replies François. "People gravitated towards the music centres to learn what was being created there. So you would have a German composer go to the Italian peninsula to study the styles there; someone might also go from Milano to Napoli to learn the Neapolitan style. You usually can't necessarily tell what region a composer comes from by his style. Hasse, who was a German composer, never composed a German opera! He was always attracted by Italian styles. Conti went to Vienna and showcased his style in this city. So you could have Venetian operas in Vienna and a German composing for San Carlo in Napoli. But you can hear a fascinating mix of cultures. Most of the operas by Handel have the French overture style because it was considered desirable to have an overture à la française."
And love? What attitudes do we find towards love in these Italian operas? "The theme of love is super-Italian, we can see that because the first operas were written around the myth of Orfeo – Peri's Euridice and then Monteverdi's Orfeo – the idea that the most incredible thing one can do is to go to hell to take back the love of your life. In fact, the Hasse piece here is also from a pastiche Orfeo put together by several composers (this Hasse aria was written for Farinelli). So Italian dramaturgy and opera were built around the idea of the depth of love."
François has a favourite sequence. Orliński wanted to sing Ottone's "Otton qual portentoso fulmine... Voi che udite" from Agrippina. "In this aria", explains François, "Ottone is wracked with sorrow because Poppea has been stolen by the mad emperor Nerone. So we hear Ottone full of grief. But we follow that with Giuseppe Maria Orlandini's Nerone, where in ‘Che m'ami ti prega’ we hear a megalomaniac Nerone ordering Poppea to love him and saying how happy he is that as emperor, he can have any woman he wants! So two sides of love, and in fact two sides of the same situation!"
That was a particularly happy find for François as the 1721 Orlandini manuscript is lost, but he was able to locate the version by Mattheson from 1723. "Germans would take successful Italian operas and redo them in Hamburg, with some changes to fit the German expectations. And this is the world-premiere recording of that aria from the version that Mattheson created just two years later, where he transposed the role of Nerone from tenor to alto."
Scarlatti gets one aria on the album, from Pirro e Demetrio. It earned a place in the history books as the first opera performed in Italian in the UK (in London in 1708) – in fact, it was given in Italian and English, with the Italian singers performing in their language, the English singers in theirs. "The character is comparing war and love. He is in love with the wrong woman but, as a warrior, determined to triumph over Cupid's arrows. It's an amazing musical image, because you have drawn-out shots in the strings that represent Cupid's arrows landing around him, and the voice dots around in martial style. Jakub really loved this mixing of love and war, and made this as his final choice."
As for the album's biggest name, François was also relieved and happy not to devote the entire recital to Handel. "There are so many albums just of Handel", he laughs, "and Handel was a genius. However", he continues, "Handel was influenced as much as he was an influencer. Or, put another way, he would borrow things he picked up from other composers. He was super-clever and would listen to others' music and use their elements, but do it better. He did this with Keiser, Bononcini and others. So any way you look at it, you get even more value if, as here, you surround Handel with the music of composers he was inspired by or whom he inspired”. So, love deconstructed, Handel deconstructed, opera being constructed – Orliński and François have given us a concept album it should be easy to fall for.
James Inverne
Source: CD Booklet
Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński is quickly gaining a reputation as a singer of striking vocal beauty and daring stagecraft. He has been hailed by critics and audiences alike, prompting the New York Times to write: "Jakub Józef Orliński combined beauty of tone and an uncommon unity of color and polish across his range". Autumn of 2018 sees the greatly anticipated release of his debut album, Anima Sacra, a recital of 18th-century rediscovered sacred arias with the baroque ensemble Il Pomo d'Oro, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev, with Erato/Warner Classics.
Mr. Orliński's star rose rapidly following major competition wins on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Metropolitan Opera National Council in 2016 and the Marcella Sembrich International Vocal Competition in 2015. In the summer of 2017, he was catapulted to international prominence when his poignant live performance of Vivaldi's "Vedrò con mio diletto" on France Musique quickly amassed more than two million views.
Highlights of the 2018-2019 season include a multi-city, international recital tour with Il Pomo d'Oro, promoting the release of Mr. Orliński's debut album, as well as his Carnegie Hall solo concert debut featuring members of New York Baroque Incorporated. He will be presented in recital by the Fundació Victoria de los Ángeles in Barcelona and will sing additional concerts in Pennsylvania and Louisiana. He debuts with the Warsaw Philharmonic in Handel's Messiah and Montreal Bach Festival in a program of Bach, Handel and Vivaldi arias. On the opera stage, Mr. Orliński will debut with the Glyndebourne Festival Opera as Eustazio in Handel's Rinaldo, and returns to Oper Frankfurt to reprise his dynamic portrayal of the title role in the same piece. He will return to Oper Frankfurt as Unulfo in Rodelinda, which will also serve as his role and house debut with Opéra de Lille under the baton of Emmanuelle Haïm.
The 2017-2018 season included critically lauded solo recitals at Wigmore Hall, Pierre Cardin's Festival De Lacoste, Festival de Musique Chambre de Saint-Paul de Vence, and Festival Nits de Clássica in Girona, Spain. He made his house and role debut with Oper Frankfurt in the title role in Handel's Rinaldo, and debuted with the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence as Orimeno in Cavalli's Erismena, which was subsequently performed on tour at the Château De Versailles and Festival de Saint-Denis. He was featured in a concert tour of Handel's Rinaldo with The English Concert under the baton of Harry Bicket, debuted at Chicago's Music of the Baroque in a program of Vivaldi excerpts conducted by Jane Glover, and joined Capella Cracoviensis for performances of Handel's Samson.
Mr. Orliński made Carnegie Hall appearances in Handel's Messiah with both Musica Sacra and Oratorio Society of New York, and performed the piece for his debuts with the Houston Symphony and Portland Baroque Orchestra. He joined the Karlsruhe Handel Festival to sing Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus and excerpts from Handel's Dixit Dominus. While a student at Juilliard, he performed the roles of the The Refugee in Jonathan Dove's Flight and Ottone in Handel's Agrippina in conjunction with Carnegie Hall's La Serenissima: Music and Arts From the Venetian Republic festival.
Mr. Orliński has triumphed in multiple vocal competitions winning first place at the Oratorio Society of New York's 2016 Lyndon Woodside Oratorio-Solo Competition, second prize in the International Stanisław Moniuszko Vocal Competition, the first and second annual International Early Music Vocal Competitions in Poland, where he received "Special Mention" and "Special Prize", respectively, first prize at Rudolf Petrák's Singing Competition in Slovakia, third place at the Debut Competition in Igersheim, Germany, Special Mention at the Eighth Annual Mazovian Golden Voices Competition in Poland, and third place at Le Grand Prix de l'Opera in Bucharest, Romania.
While completing his Master's degree in vocal performance studying with Anna Radziejewska at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, he participated in the prestigious young artist program Opera Academy in Teatr Wielki-Opera Narodowa where he studied with Eytan Pessen and Matthias Rexroth. Mr. Orliński earned his Graduate Diploma at The Juilliard School, studying with Edith Wiens.
In his spare time, Mr. Orliński enjoys breakdancing, in addition to other styles of dance. His achievements in this arena include prizes in many dance competitions: fourth place at the Red Bull BC One Poland Cypher competition, second place on the Stylish Strike – Top Rock Contest and second place at The Style Control competition, among others. He has also been featured in a commercial for the street wear company CROPP, as well as featured as a dancer, model and acrobat in campaigns for Levi's, Nike, Turbokolor, Samsung, Mercedes-Benz, MAC Cosmetics, Dannon and Algida.
Jakub Józef Orliński is an exclusive Erato/Warner Classics artist.
Source: jakubjozeforlinski.com
Giovanni Battista Bononcini: "Infelice mia costanza" (Aminta)
George Frideric Handel: "Pena tiranna" (Amadigi di Gaula)
Photos by Honorata Karapuda
More photos
See also
Jakub Józef Orliński: A Millennial Countertenor's Pop-Star Appeal
George Frideric Handel: Messiah (1754 version) – Jakub Józef Orliński, Sunhae Im, Samuel Boden, José Antonio López, Warsaw Philharmonic Choir & Orchestra, Martin Haselböck (4K Ultra High Definition)
The best new classical albums: November 2019
George Frideric Handel: Rodelinda – Jeanine De Bique, Tim Mead, Benjamin Hulett, Avery Amereau, Jakub Józef Orliński, Andrea Mastroni – Le Concert d'Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm (HD 1080p)
Francesco Cavalli: Erismena – Francesca Aspromonte, Carlo Vistoli, Susanna Hurrell, Jakub Józef Orliński, Alexander Miminoshvili, Lea Desandre, Andrea Vincenzo Bonsignore, Stuart Jackson, Tai Oney, Jonathan Abernethy – Cappella Mediterranea, Leonardo García Alarcón (HD 1080p)
“Anima Sacra” – Jakub Józef Orliński, Il Pomo d'Oro, Maxim Emelyanychev – Live at Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne, November 16, 2018
Jakub Józef Orliński: "I have already jumped over all of my dreams"
Enemies in Love | George Frideric Handel – Jakub Józef Orliński, Natalia Kawałek, Il Giardino d'Amore, Stefan Plewniak
Jakub Józef Orliński: A star is rising in the world of opera
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