Ravenna Festival
Betulia liberata
Oratorio per 4 voci, coro e strumenti
libretto di Pietro Metastasio
musica di Niccolò Jommelli
(Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Bologna)
Riccardo Muti direttore
Giuditta Laura Polverelli
Ozia Terry Wey
Carmi Dimitri Korchak
Achior Vito Priante
Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini
Vienna Philharmonia Choir
maestro del coro
Walter Zeh
In 1743 Niccolò Jommelli had been on the scene for six years, and was in Padua, setting to music Metastasio’s Demofoonte for the first time: this libretto would accompany him for the rest of his life, and 3 more settings would follow the first one. A year earlier, in Venice, he had confronted his first oratorio on Metastasio’s Isacco figura del Redentore. And Metastasio it was once again when, in 1743, he set to music a rather young and fresh Betulia liberata (written in 1734, the poem had been set to music only 3 times before). The composer was not yet thirty, and his love for Metastasio did not pass unnoticed to the eyes of Johann Adolf Hasse, who recommended him for the position of chapel master at the Ospedale degli Incurabili in Venice, some time around 1743.
