Performer: Ensemble Caprice

Richard Turp sees Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha Triumphans triumph at its Montreal premiere in a sparkling performance by Ensemble Caprice

Antonio Vivaldi’s three-act opera seria Motezuma was created in Venice in 1733 (months after Handel’s extraordinary Orlando in London) but was thought lost until a manuscript turned up in Germany in 2002. The story is a romanticized and fanciful adaptation of the destruction of Motezuma’s Aztec empire in Mexico by the Spanish armies of Fernando Cortés in the early 16th century.