Plenty of World Cup matches have headed into extra time this tournament, with several decided by penalties. After a punishing Wigmore Hall encounter with Il Giardino Armonico consisting of five Vivaldi arias and Haydn’s cantata Arianna a Naxos, soprano Julia Lezhneva took the evening into serious overtime offering not one, but seven – yes, seven – encores. Team manager Giovanni Antonini brought himself off the bench for a recorder concerto in each half, but barely got a look in. Lezhneva’s stamina never flagged. Mine, however…
Vivaldi was a dab hand at depicting stormy seas and Lezhneva’s selection was framed by two of his most tempestuous operatic arias. “Agitata da due venti” (from Griselda) and “Siam navi all'onde algenti” (L’Olimpiade) were dispatched with thrilling rapidfire coloratura, if not many consonants. Lezhneva’s tone is very clean, a dazzling white that doesn’t always allow for a lot of expression. Even in slower numbers like “Sposa son disprezzata” (Bajazet), she decorated the da capo repeats, which felt misplaced in this particular aria where the character Irene is lamenting her betrayal.
Another betrayal – Ariadne’s by Theseus – was Lezhneva’s sole, but lengthy contribution to the programme’s official second half. Haydn’s writing is dramatic and Antonini, making his sole conducting appearance of the evening, injected plenty of incident. Lezhneva seemed less at home here, score-bound, but there was pathos aplenty in the work’s two slow arias before the fierce coda, “Misera abbandonata”.
Antonini, who co-founded Il Giardino Armonico in 1985, performed concertos by Vivaldi and Telemann with aplomb. It’s easy to understand why Vivaldi’s D major chamber concerto RV 90 bears the title Il Gardellino (The Goldfinch). Performed on the sopranino recorder, it twitters and chirrups merrily and Antonini played up the avian imitations with trills and florid decorations. On a treble recorder, he displayed further digital dexterity in Telemann’s C major concerto. Incidentally, the ensemble’s plucked contingent for the evening featured Margret Koell on Baroque harp rather than the usual theorbo or lute.
Led stylishly by Dmitry Smirnov, all seven members proved lively and attentive partners in this final programme of their Wigmore Hall residency. I hope they earned overtime payments for the (self) indulgent series of encores which began with Lezhneva testing how many notes she could sing on a single breath in Carl Heinrich Grain’s “Mi paventi il figlio indegno” from Britannico (answer: a lot). There was spitfire coloratura in Vivaldi’s aria di furore (rage aria) “Armatae face et anguibus” as Vagaus raises the alarm on the discovery of his slain master Holofernes in Juditha triumphans. The softer numbers, balm to the ears, included a limpid “Lascia la spina”, one of three encores from Handel’s Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. Vivaldi’s “Zeffiretti che sussurrate” allowed Antonini, whom I’d suspected had already boarded the flight back to Italy, a brief reappearance to depict the text’s swallows and turtledoves. As more and more of the audience slunk away, others stayed to roar on Lezhneva, who tirelessly kept going. You certainly got a lot of notes for your money.
