L’Aurora Ingannata

Giacobbi’s writing in Aurora strongly reflects the widely known compositional style of his “Florentine” contemporaries, Peri and Caccini.
His opera is indeed founded principally on an agile and harmonically interesting recitative, occasionally broken up by strophic arias and homophonic choruses.
From a dramaturgical point of view as well, one finds in L’Aurora Ingannata certain situations and solutions which had already been successfully employed in Florentine circles: pastoral elements such as the chorus of hunters; the unexpected echo which responds from a distance to Aurora’s laments; the “high chorus” of the Graces; the dark and gloomy writing reserved for the lords of darkness, Sleep and Morpheus.
A typical example of a “chamber” intermedio, L’Aurora thus presents in miniature all of the elements characteristic of the larger “dramma per musica” of the early seventeenth century, and may be seen as an ideal example of a genre which strongly marked the musical and dramatic life of its time.
This recording of L’Aurora Ingannata follows the edition which was published in Venice in 1608 by Giacomo Vincenti. Gian Luca Lastraioli has revised the entire score, reconstructing the orchestration (which is missing from this and all other operas of the time, with the exception of Monteverdi’s Orfeo), and has realized the basso continuo.
In accordance with a widespread musical practice of the seventeenth century, he has also inserted at proper moments instrumental “ritornelli” and “sinfonie” borrowed from contemporary musical literature, which serve to link the various dramatic scenes to each other.