MARCO DA GAGLIANO La Flora
GCD 923904. 2 CDs — Clarissa Reali Valeria La Grotta Mauro Borgioni Marta Fumagalli Arianna Stornello Maximiliano Danta Texeira Alessio Tosi Margherita Rotondi Marco Saccardin Alice Fraccari Nikos Angelis Rocco Lia Zoreslava Vynnyk Allabastrina Elena Sartori —
Production details Total playing time 51:53 + 76:05 Recording: Fusignano Corelli, Ravenna, (Italy), 6-10 June and 13-14 September 2022 Recording producer: Simon Lanz Executive producers: Elena Sartori, Michael Sawall
—
Buy this product
MARCO DA GAGLIANO (1582-1643)La Flora
CD I Prologo Atto Primo Atto Secondo CD II Atto Terzo Atto Quarto Atto Quinto –
About this album
The birth of opera began around 1600 in Florence, where this new genre was used to accompany important political events. The court conductor Marco da Gagliano, who had also become acquainted with Monteverdi’s new style during his time in Mantua, created a whole series of operas for the Medici house, but only two have survived. His opera La Flora, to a libretto by the Florentine court poet Andrea Salvadori, was written for the wedding celebrations of Margerita de’ Medici to the Duke of Parma Odoardo Farnese in 1628. The mythological material has many political references and tells of the love between the wind Zeffiro and the nymph Clori, who changes her name to ?Flora? when she marries and gives birth to many kinds of flowers. Botticelli had already pictorially realised this myth 40 years earlier in his Birth of Venus and La Primavera. For the present recording, more than a dozen solo singers, choristers and a large instrumental cast have come together to bring Gagliano’s opera back to life almost 400 years after its premiere!