Music history is grateful to Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) largely for his contributions to chamber music. As the "father" of the string quartet, Boccherini had a prodigious career as a cellist in the major European capitols, never lacked for noble patronage, and published vast amounts of instrumental music during his own lifetime. As far as vocal music goes, though, Boccherini wrote only one full-scale stage piece (the 1786 zarzuela La Clementina), two oratorios (Gioas, Re di Giudea and Il Giuseppe Riconosciuto) and a smattering of cantatas, an unusually small amount of dramatic work for the voice, when one considers Boccherini's renown and output. Considering the close contacts Boccherini enjoyed at the Viennese court, it is a wonder he was not more involved with vocal music. His brother wrote libretti for Salieri and Haydn, his sister was a court dancer, and Pietro Metastasio, the most important librettist of his generation, served up the libretti of Boccherini's two oratorios.

Il Giuseppe Riconosciuto, which tells the old testament story of Joseph revealed to his brethren in Egypt, was written by Boccherini at twenty-three, by which age he had already been in the limelight as virtuoso and composer a good ten years. In his eager program notes, Herbert Handt (conductor of the live performance in Lucca, Boccherini's hometown, of which this recording is a document) asserts the Associazione Musicale Lucchese's intention to prove that "Boccherini was not destined to become, above all, a composer of instrumental music, but...could have become important in the 18th-century operatic world." On the strength of this oratorio, however, this assertion is difficult to uphold.

To be sure, there are moments of great beauty and of poignancy. Judah's scene "Come! Ei grido," describing his father Jacob's sorrow at losing his son, is a honey: block chords give a patrician feel, and a deft use of winds illustrates the father's mournful emotions. Joseph's wife Asenath likewise has a stirring aria describing the fear and awe with which she regards her husband's connection to God, "Nell'orror d'atra foresta." With a dark use of horns and scuttering strings Boccherini suggests the palpable fear of being lost in a forest. In the contrasting section of the aria, however, when she sings of the "true light" that will guide her in life (her husband), Boccherini sets the words in a tangle of trills which seem contrary to the stability Asenath seeks. The dramatic moment is a cry for faith, and Boccherini sets it as virtuosic display. This discrepancy between text and musical affect is an overriding problem of the oratorio. The music itself is of high quality, but while Boccherini succeeds in illuminating individual moments of the text, the broad strokes that create fully alive characters (on which successful opera depends) elude him. On the evidence of this oratorio, he was wise to pursue the instrumental course.

While much of the vocal music is virtuosic, requiring a two-octave command of the singers, Boccherini is most successful when writing in the pathetic mode. Simeon's recounting of when Joseph was torn from his father, "Oh Dio! Che sembrami veder presente," changes key often and uses chromaticism to create the disturbed anguish of the father's emotions. The wonderful tenor Mario Zeffiri (who also sings the role of Joseph's right hand man Tanete) takes the material and runs with it. He is a tenor with ringing high Cs and Ds, equally as at home with fioritura passages as with sensitive ones. The other sovereign (sovrana) singer on this recording is the beautiful-voiced Barbara Vignudelli, in the role of Joseph. Her coloratura singing is superb, clean and crisp (frizzante, vivace), but her limpid quality is especially arresting (che colpisce). Generally speaking, she has the least affecting arias, however. Her very first aria, a short sermon on the nature of pity and suffering, is given a forthright tempo giusto setting by Boccherini. Best is Joseph's triplet aria in the Second Part, in which he says "I shall be that loving mother who often threatens her beloved children but hesitates to punish them." Joseph shows a great emotional range in this aria, and the large leaps on "minaccia [threatens]" are executed by Vignudelli with virtuosic grace. The other singers have their problems. The tremulous bass Nicola Muganaini is somewhat stalwart as Judah, the dark-voiced soprano Laura Crescini simply miscast as the young Beniamino. As Asenath, the contralto Barbara Di Castri has a beguiling timbre, and she is emotionally invested; but she has difficulty knitting her two voices, and the result is that she often sounds as if she is holding a conversation with her uncle.

Handt's tempi, whether stately or brilliant, are well chosen throughout. The strings of the Orchestra Ausermusici are often scrappy and imprecise, but the winds play quite superbly. I found the noise of turning pages on this live recording quite annoying after a while. While the recording fails to finger Boccherini as a true opera composer, it is interesting as a document of where Italian vocal writing stood in the second half of the eighteenth century.

DREW MINTER