The last great castrato, we are told, was Vellutti who was a favourite with many early 19th century composers.  Tuesday night’s concert at Koerner Hall as part of Toronto Summer Music was a tribute to him with counter-tenor Franco Fagioli accompanied by L’Orchestre de l’Opéra de Versailles and their flamboyant violinist/conductor Stefan Plewniak performing music associated with Vellutti interspersed with orchestral music from (mostly) the same operas.

It got off to a dramatic start.  Plewniak and his violin/viola players processed, playing vigorously, to their places followed by the rest of the band and launched into the Sinfonia from Rossini’s Tancredi.  They are really good!  There’s tremendous attack from the strings (some interesting bowing techniques on display).and the winds, including valveless horns, have a period sound but it’s hardly ever comically out of tune.  Then there’s Plewniak.  Tall, with a long beard and shoulder length hair, dressed in a below the knee length black gown, all he lacked was a pointy hat.  He’s a very kinetic conductor and a terrific virtuoso on the violin as he demonstrated later on in the Polonaise from a Rode violin concerto.

Then there’s Fagioli.  He’s been around for a while but not much seen in North America where castrato roles are given to a mezzo-soprano more often than not.  He has an interesting voice.  It’s accurate and agile, he manages runs well and he can sustain a high note rather impressively.  None of the material performed on Tuesday had really intricate coloratura, which was apparently his calling card earlier in his career.

What we got was quite a varied selection of arias from, mostly, not so well known composers.  For example, he sang the quite showy “Ah se mi lasci o cara” from Nicolini’s Traiano in Dacia and a darker, more dramatic, excerpt from Bonfichi’s Attila plus a sizeable chunk from Nicolini’s Carlo Magno.  In the second half there was a more lyrical set of recits and arias from Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira (finally an opera I had some familiarity with! and, to boot, it was preceded by the Sinfonia from the same opera that more often sails under other colours!  There was more agility on display in a series of excerpts from Mercadante’s Andronico.  It does seem a bit odd that with all this material that virtually no-one in the audience had likely encountered before there was neither printed text nor surtitles.  I get that it doesn’t really matter in a concert like this but still…

They were generous with the encores.  There was a cavatina of which I did not catch and a rather beautiful  “Lascia ch’io pianga” before the band played us out with what I think was French dance music.  All in all pretty satisfying!

Photo credit: Lucky Tang