Soler, Martín y - Il sogno & La dora festeggiante - Otero, Juan Bautista (conductor)
Royal Chamber Opera Company
Juan Bautista Otero, conductor
Il Sogno and La Dora festeggiante are a small fresco of this period of transformation, not yet resolved, of the individual and the prototypes of a turn-of-the-century society eroded by too many social ballasts. La Dora represents the end of a period, in which the Olympic gods serve as a model to human behaviour, while Il Sogno, is, deep down, a preromantic spiritual work, in which the nymphs are no longer unattainable beings, beings that do not suffer or have human passions but on the contrary, they embody them, they live them in their own skin in spite of being in an idyllic place. Da Ponte has chosen an event like sleep as a daily action as its interruption to highlight the consequences in some beings which before, they did not feel. The present volume combines the two only scenic cantatas by Martín y Soler located up to now: La Dora festeggiante (Torino, 1783), with poetry by Cesare Olivieri, and Il Sogno (Vienna, 1787) - the only example of collaboration of Martín y Soler with Da Ponte in this most extensive form of the genre; both, together with Il re Gerone (Naples, 1779) and the libretto of Luigi Serio and La deità benéfica (San Petersburgo,1790), with text by Ferdinando Moretti, constitute the main corpus of profane cantatas of the Valencian composer.