Channelling Francesca Cuzzoni
Angela Hicks, Opera Settecento
London Handel Festival
The Charterhouse, 9 March 2023
The first of the London Handel Festival’s ‘Lunchtime in the City’ concerts featured soprano Angela Hicks and Opera Settecento in a concert following the career of the famous 18th-century soprano Francesca Cuzzoni (1696-1778), one of Handel’s most famous singers. She was born in northern Italy and, after her debut in 1714, spent eight years performing in Florence, Milan, Bologna, Turin), Padua and Venice before her first visit to London in 1722. These early Italian years were represented by the opening showpiece aria Fra catene ognor penando from Vivaldi’s Scanderbeg (RV 732) and gentler Lasciatemi in pace from Orlandini’s 1721 Nerone.
You can imagine the headlines in today’s gutter press. “Woman seduces man, gets him drunk, then beheads him. Claims God told her to do it”. She would probably spend the rest of her life in a institution for the criminally insane. But in the Bible (or, at least, in the Bible of the Catholics and Orthodox Christians, but not the Protestants, who count the Book of Judith as apocryphal, or the Jews), she was hailed as a national heroine who lived to the age of 105. Musically her story inspired Tallis’s Spem in alium, and works by Scarlatti, Mozart and Parry. In art, she inspired the likes of Cranach, Donatello, Caravaggio, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Goya and Klimpt (pictured). She is also the subject matter for Vivaldi’s only surviving oratorio Juditha triumphans devicta Holofernis barbarie, written exactly 300 years ago, in 1716. The story of Judith’s ‘triumph over the barbarians of Holofernes’ would have had a strong contemporary reference to Venetians, whose army had just defeated the Ottoman invaders in Corfu. Judith clearly represents Venice, and the Assyrian general Holofernes, the Ottomans.
Much of Vivaldi’s music was written for the Venetian Ospedali della Pietà, one of many such orphanages set up to cater for the many unwanted, and usually female, babies that seemed to appear some nine months after the carnival season. Although originally funded as charities, they quickly established a reputation for their musical activities, attracting large crowds and provided a secure, and indeed rather opulent, financial establishment. Firmly on the tourist essential to-do list, these female choirs attracted such comments as the one by Charles de Brosses in 1739 who wrote that “there is nothing so pleasant as to see a pretty young nun in a white habit, with a bunch of pomegranate blossoms over her ear directing the orchestra … their voices are delightful in their elegance and lightness”.
The European Union Baroque Orchestra was formed in 1985, and has recently successfully negotiated its way through a difficult period of financial uncertainty. It celebrated its renewed, if short term security with the first short series of concerts for the newly formed orchestra of young musicians. They are selected anew each year through combined educational and selection courses and then usually meet five or six times a year to rehearse and then tour a new programme. One of the key features of EUBO is giving the musicians the chance to experience life as a touring orchestral musician, evidenced on this occasion by 
Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews + 