Pergolesi: L’Olimpiade album review

Pietro Metastasio’s tale of dirty doings at the ancient Olympic Games proved so popular that more than 60 composers set it to music, including Caldara (for whom it was written), Vivaldi and Cherubini. Pergolesi’s version, premiered in 1735, resurrected in 1937, is among the finest, presaging what should have been a glorious operatic career if only the composer hadn’t died at the age of 26.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: L’Olimpiade

The story begins as the formidable Megacle is persuaded to compete in disguise as his hot-headed and not entirely honourable friend Licida. What Megacle doesn’t know is that the prize is the hand of Aristea, the woman he has fallen in love with himself. Throw in Licida’s cast-off mistress Argene masquerading as a shepherdess and the discovery that Licida is actually Aristea’s long-lost twin and you have all the ingredients for a plot of brain-addling complexity.

Alessandro De Marchi recorded the somewhat rambling four-hour epic back in 2010 but the unobtrusive cuts in Giulio Prandi’s two-and-a-half hour version ensure the drama flies by. The conducting is ideally pacy and the Orchestra Ghislieri’s playing is sinewy and tightly sprung, even if the recording lacks the sonic depth of De Marchi’s account.

In a fine cast, Carlotta Colombo stands out as a richly rounded Aristea, neatly contrasted with Silvia Frigato’s plaintive Argene. Josè Maria Lo Monaco’s supple mezzo-soprano brings appropriate complexity to Licida, with Theodora Raftis a convincingly boyish Megacle. The recording was made in Teatro Pergolesi, an 18th-century theatre in Jesi (Ancona)- Pergolesi’s hometown, in 2025. It includes stage noise and some pesky intermittent applause, but nonetheless conveys the thrill of live performance.

Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify