William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is all about its melancholic title character. Yet the Danish Prince’s eloquence seduces most of us to overlook the play’s melodramatic plot: a murdered king, usurping brother, desperate son, faithless wife, and treacherous friends.
The tale came down to us through Saxo Grammaticus, a 13th century historian of Denmark. To composers, as to Shakespeare, it offered a wide range of intense emotional conflicts perfectly suited to opera. In the late 17th and early 18th century, some responded with versions of Ambleto in which a soprano or castrato sings Ophelia, Gertrude, or Hamlet himself. Francesco Gasparini’s 1705 setting is one of few to survive complete; it is currently playing in its entirety at the Theater an der Wien.
In a London performance seven years later, Gasparini’s opera was presented as a pastiche to which Giuseppe Carcani, Domenico Scarlatti, Carlo Francesco Pollaroio, and even Georg-Frederic Handel contributed arias. Enough fragments remain to comprise a fascinating evening of Baroque opera.
Enter Roberta Mameli, an accomplished Italian early music soprano with two decades of experience, often at top opera houses. She has made recordings ranging from standard Baroque operas to a jazz adaptation of Monteverdi. Backed by the Lyon-based orchestra Le concert de l’Hostel Dieu, she recently released a widely praised CD of Ambleto excerpts, augmented with non-Hamlet compositions of Johann Fux and Johann Adolf Hasse. A tour ensued, beginning in Lyons several months ago and ending with this performance at University of Vermont’s prestigious Lane Recital Series.
While Mameli’s recording of this material is tidy and engaging, live performance revealed a stage animal. A tall and striking woman with intense facial expressions, she sings with technical security and fearless abandon. A remarkable musical and dramatic imagination guides her mercurial shifts in timbre and dynamics, elegant ornamentation, poignant yet stylish phrasing, penetrating high notes and unusually rich low ones, and crisp textual emphasis—often driven by emotional intensity to the very edge of technical capacity.
High points included Handel’s scathingly disdainful aria “Tu indegno sei d’allor” (“You are unworthy of laurels,” originally from Agrippina), Gasparini’s poignant “Nella mia sfortunata prigionia” (“In my unhappy prison”), and the fireworks of Carcani’s “Son sdegnato (e son geloso)” (“I am indignant (and jealous)”). A cleverly chosen encore, “Lascio ch’io piangia” from Handel’s Rinaldo, ended the evening on a contemplative and gentle side.
Mameli was accompanied throughout by a reduced ensemble (string quartet of viols and theorbo) from the orchestra with which she made the recording, led from the harpsichord by Franck-Emmanuel Comte. Once they warmed and tuned up, they played with energy—even if at times falling short of the richer, deeper blend of the larger and instrumentally diverse ensemble of 15 found on the recording.
Mameli’s account of this music was riveting from start to finish: a classic example of how a great singing actor can bring to life not so great music. A nearly sold-out audience responded enthusiastically to this memorable evening from a singer I would welcome a chance to hear again live.
Andrew Moravcsik
The Ghosts of Hamlet
Roberta Mameli, Soprano
Le concert de l’Hostel Dieu Baroque Orchestra
Franck-Emmanuel Comte, Director and Conductor
The University of Vermont Lane Series, University of Vermont Recital Series, 21 March 2025
Photo by Luke Awtry Photography.