In the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, a little Baroque magic happens every January. For five editions now, the island of Malta has played host to the Valletta International Baroque Festival, bringing together the Baroque beauty of venues in the capital city with the best music from the period. Next year, the celebration is even greater as Valletta becomes the European Capital of Culture for 2018.
The city of Valletta was completely rebuilt after the Great Siege of 1565 during the rule of the Order of St John also known as Knights Hospitaller. Therefore, many of the buildings are Baroque in character, including the charming Teatru Manoel, a 623-seater theatre with three tiers of wooden boxes and a trompe-l’oeil ceiling, built in 1731 and named after its commissioner, the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Hospitaller, Fra António Manoel de Vilhena. The theatre is one of the festival’s key venues along with St John's Co-Cathedral, dedicated to John the Baptist, and a range of churches around Valletta.
It’s no surprise to see Baroque giants Handel, Bach and Vivaldi featuring in the festival’s sixth edition in January 2018, but you’ll also find lesser-performed composers tucked away, people like Giovanni Bononcini, Niccolò Jommelli, Maltese composer Benigno Zerafa, or Francesca Caccini. The latter is represented by her opera La Liberazione di Ruggiero, believed to be the earliest opera written by a woman and the only opera of Caccini’s to survive. She was part of a musical family which regularly performed at the Medici court in Florence – her father, Giulio, wrote his own version of Euridice in 1602. La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina (The Liberation of Ruggiero from the island of Alcina) was premiered in Florence in 1625 and is based on an episode from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso, a plot which later inspired Handel (three times – Orlando, Ariodante and Alcina) and Vivaldi (Orlando furioso) a century later. Francesca wrote her opera in the stile moderno, a term coined by her father to indicate recitatives and canzonettas in the style of Monteverdi. Listening to La Liberazione, it’s certainly not a million miles from Monteverdi in its musical flavour. Caccini’s opera was revived in recent years, notably a Brighton Early Music Festival performance we reviewed which concluded that “the work surely deserves a place in the history of early Baroque opera regardless of the gender of the composer”. The Huelgas Ensemble performed the opera in January 2016 and revisit it in Valletta to round off the festival in style.