Stéphanie Varnerin & L'Astrée - Opera Arias in Turin in 18th Century (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Beginning in the 1680s, with a considerable delay when considered in relation to the principal theatrical venues of the Italian Peninsula, the capital of Savoy finally gave up its resistance, surrendered to the opera, and in 1740 went so far as to provide itself with a theater, the Teatro Regio, that was worthy of immortalization in the pages of the Encyclopédie and obtained the status of a magnet for illustrious travelers and visitors. During the mid-1760s Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande regarded it as »the most studied, the best composed, the most complete that we see in Italy…the most richly and nobly decorated that there is in the modern genre.« Some years later it seemed to Charles Burney to be »very large and elegant« and worthy of being regarded among the most beautiful in Europe.