IBO & Peter Whelan - The Trials of Tenducci - All Music

The title The Trials of Tenducci here refers to a castrato, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, who spent much of his career in the British Isles, and part of that in Dublin. Like some of the other castrati, Tenducci exerted a strong attraction over aristocratic women, one of them in Dublin. The details are in the booklet of this Linn release and may constitute one of the factors that have brought the album commercial success. Another is likely that the music here, except for the concluding Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165, of Mozart, which is included on the slenderest of pretexts, is quite rare and plenty interesting. Few, or possibly none, of the pieces were actually composed in Ireland, but they were connected to Tenducci or at least emerged from the same milieu, and for the average listener, they will fill in a lot of empty space in a picture of the London music scene of the era, even if not necessarily a picture of Dublin. There is a symphony by Pierre van Maldere that's a competent essay in the Italianate style, and then mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught, who does not quite have the desired castrato quality but is pleasant to hear, starts in with a couple of extracts from the opera Artaxerxes by Thomas Arne, one of which Tenducci apparently had such a hit with that children sang it on the streets of Dublin. An interesting revelation here is how much of a role Irish folk song played in concert music of the time. Pieces like "The Irish Medley" from Tommaso Giordani's incidental music to the play The Island of Saints have occasionally been recorded, but to hear no fewer than three folk-based pieces, one of them arranged by Johann Christian Bach, puts the folk contribution in a new perspective. Erraught and the Irish Baroque Orchestra under Peter Whelan offer crisp performances throughout, and they have done a service by bringing this music to light.