It must have been 2005 when I was first converted to the gospel of Fabio Biondi, conductor of the Baroque ensemble Europa Galante. A friend gave me their version of Vivaldi's opera Bajazet. I played it almost to death at first, and still often put it on. Then just this month came the release of Biondi's next complete Vivaldi opera, Ercole sul Termodonte. And it is even better. The review praise is extravagant, including the claim that Virgin has here assembled one of the strongest casts in the history of recorded opera.
Ercole was long thought to be lost. The score has only recently been reconstructed – via archival research and imaginative extrapolation, as Biondi explains at length in his liner notes. First performed in 1723, it provided Vivaldi with a suitably splashy debut in Rome (where all the female roles had to be sung by countertenors in conformity with the Pope's unwillingness to see women on stage). The basic story involves the conquest of the Amazons by Hercules. But the plot is never more than a coat-hanger in any Baroque opera. In this case it is a pretext for regular alternations between the warlike and the amorous, violent mood-swings that supply a crazy wonderful rhythm to the whole.
