Francesco Conti's L'Issipile drew a blank with audiences at its Vienna premiere in 1732. Its failure, it would seem, was ascribed to its text, a problematic effort by the otherwise phenomenally successful Pietro Metastasio, who was generally regarded as the greatest and most influential librettist of his day.
Metastasio's starting point is the mythic bloodbath on the Greek island of Lemnos, during which the women slaughtered their philandering men – with the exception of Issipile (Hypsipyle in English), who spared her father, Thoas. With a uniquely operatic timing, two of her suitors arrive in the middle of this atrocity: the hero Jason, Hypsipyle's fiance, and the pirate Learchus, who turns out to be the long-lost son of Eurynome, the massacre's instigator. The queasy juxtaposition of erotic farce with an off-stage narrative of violence now strikes us as absurdist, though it undoubtedly fractured the boundaries of 18th-century taste.
The score, meanwhile, remained buried in a library in Vienna until it was discovered by countertenor and academic Flavio Ferri-Benedetti during his research for a doctoral thesis on Metastasio. He went on to edit the score, then to play Learchus in this knock-out performance – the first of modern times, given by La Nuova Musica and conducted by David Bates. The jolting uncertainties of tone lead, on occasion, to moments of dramatic awkwardness, but there are some wonderful arias, all of them terrifically done.
Lucy Crowe's Hypsipyle was all defiant coloratura and passion. Lawrence Zazzo's exquisite grace as Jason contrasted sharply with Ferri-Benedetti's flamboyance as his rival. Diana Montague as haughty Eurynome delivered her big lament for the supposedly dead Learchus with searching intensity. John Mark Ainsley, meanwhile, was the bewildered Thoas, and Rebecca Bottone appeared as the vindictive Rodope – Hypsipyle's confidante, hopelessly in love with Learchus. Bates and La Nuova Musica, meanwhile, go from strength to strength.
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