Balducci Reanimates Farinelli in Andria's Candlelit Premiere

Two performances of Farinelli: The Voice That Remains lit the Palazzo Ducale in Andria this autumn, a 75-minute music theater piece carried by male soprano Nicolò Balducci. The work, written and directed by Andria-born MariaLuisa Bafunno, premiered inside the Festival Internazionale Castel dei Mondi di Andria.

What is the new work actually about?

Its subject is Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi, known as Farinelli — the 18th-century castrato soprano whose voice dominated Europe's grandest stages and royal courts. Bafunno's script frames that fame as the consequence of a childhood mutilation. Castrato here means a singer castrated before puberty to retain the boy's high register and adult lung power; Bafunno never writes the word itself, on the apparent theory that the room already knows.

What does Bafunno's text add to the music?

Most of the weight, frankly. The script drags the listener past the spectacle into Farinelli's grief and estrangement. Two short anecdotes do the heaviest lifting. A Neapolitan flower girl takes his hand on his walk to Maestro Porpora's; he pulls it back and confides, "Other men go on, and I… I stop… I knew I had to stop, I already knew." Later he rounds on his mother: "Do you know what it means… when a married woman smiles at you in front of her husband, and the husband smiles too?" Neither line is ornament; both land like stones.

How does the staging set the mood?

Audiences queued at the Palazzo's main gate and were handed candles. A harpsichordist, posing as one of Farinelli's servants, set the terms: "he sings only by candlelight. He says still light gets things wrong, while a flame breathes, just like he does." Phones were banned, since they "would distract him." Inside, an oblong room sat 150 people in three rows; chandeliers lay scattered across a three-meter runway beneath video mapping by Luca Attilli. Donato Didonna's white baroque military dress — feathered helmet, Gianni Bertoli's saturated lighting — completed the picture. Less La Scala, more candlelit chapel.

Can Balducci carry the vocal demands?

This was the question. A solid reading would not have saved the evening. He opened with two Riccardo Broschi arias — "Qual guerriero in campo armato" and "Son qual nave" — and pulled every stop the baroque coloratura tradition offers. Rapid divisions (florid passages running up and down a scale), audacious leaps, elaborate ornaments, a trill that wouldn't quit. He bounded between podiums like a man half his age.

The mood then turned. Hasse's "Pallido il sole" from Artaserse (1730) arrived coated in anger; Balducci's voice cracked and broke into weeping. Bafunno staged the moment by laying his warrior costume on a podium, a desecsated corpse. Porpora's "Alto Giove" from Polifemo (1735) deepened the meditation on a gift that had also become a curse. Harpsichordist Il Baskerville, violinist Ninni Visaggi and cellist Federico Del Gaudio matched him note for note.

What's the verdict?

Balducci closes on Handel's "Lascia ch'io pianga" and earns the choice. Phrasing turns delicate. The aria's beauty recasts his life as both triumph and amputation. The piece reads, fairly, as a pastiche opera with substantial dialogue — generous, probably correct, since the sung numbers do the dramatic lifting all evening. It deserves further productions in halls under 200 seats. Book Balducci first.