Interview, Max Cencic on Hasse's Il Siroe Re di Persia

Shortly before Christmas I spent a newsletter singing the praises of Armonia Atenea, Parnassus Arts and Max Emanuel Cencic for carrying out one of the most vital and spirited bits of musical excavation of 2014 - the first-ever recording of Johann Adolf Hasse's Siroe Re di Persia, featuring singing from Franco Fagioli, Julia Lezhneva, and Cencic himself in the title-role as the put-upon monarch-in-waiting. Since then, Siroe's featured as a Gramophone Editor's Choice and a Presto Disc of the Year, as well as in Building A Library's Opera Round-Up, which will be broadcast just as this article goes to press - I threw a few questions about the project at Max himself just before we all packed up for the Christmas break, and now seems a pertinent time to share his responses...!

How did you come across this work in the first place?

Over the past few years I'd become very interested in music written between 1740 and 1770, and thanks to a specialist team of researchers we unearthed Siroe, which seemed to me to be the most important of Hasse’s operas, effectively condensing Hasse’s operatic career.

Why the Dresden Siroe (from 1763)? Does it show a more radical Hasse than the Bologna version from 1733?

The Dresden version is certainly far more mature and interesting dramatically, not least because it was less of a ‘circus’ built around star singers (Caffarelli and Farinelli had both sung in the Bologna version, but of course we don’t know what they even sounded like by then!). Hasse was most definitely drawing on ideas about opera reform by this stage in his career, though not necessarily in quite the same way as Gluck; however, political pressures (the situation at the Dresden court at the time was volatile because of the war in Saxony), plus Hasse’s own ill health, meant that he didn't manage to revise the entire score and ended up retaining the last third of the opera from Bologna.

Were there any decisions to be made regarding cuts and/or insertion-arias?

We actually recorded the entirety of the Dresden version, with the exception of a couple of recitatives which we pruned – we even added two arias (for Laodice and Siroe).

What attracted you to the title-role, rather than that of the scheming Medarse (who has the more virtuosic music)?

I always wanted to sing the role of Siroe because [Pasquale] Bruscolini (the Italian soprano castrato who sang the part at the Dresden premiere] is kind of a spirit-animal for me - our voices seem to sit in exactly the same place!

Hasse was one of the most celebrated composers of his day, but until recently has been little more than a footnote in the musical history-books: why do you think his music is only just coming to prominence again now?

Even more than other baroque music, Hasse’s operas make the most extreme vocal demands – extreme coloratura ability as well as extreme highs and extreme lows - to the extent that you need three Julia Lehznevas and five Franco Fagiolis to do them justice!

So what's next, both in terms of solo recital discs and complete opera recordings?

I've got a solo album of the arias from the Neapolitan School coming up in the spring; then complete recordings of Vinci’s Catone in Utica, Pergolesi's Adriano in Siria and two further Handel operas - Radamisto and Arminio.

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