APOCRYPHA WATCH: Juditha Triumphans, by Vivaldi, is playing in Boston.

Baroque delivers a rare Vivaldi in vivid color

By Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff | April 2, 2007

Boston Baroque's current season leans rather heavily on greatest hits of the repertoire such as "Don Giovanni," "Messiah," and Beethoven's Fifth. But music director Martin Pearlman also has a nose for sniffing out music that flies a bit below the radar screen -- not exactly obscure but performed rarely enough to perk up the ears. Last year in the rediscovery department was Cherubini's noble yet neglected C minor Requiem (just out on CD); this season it is Vivaldi's only surviving oratorio, "Juditha Triumphans," which the group performed vibrantly on Saturday night in Jordan Hall.

It is a lovely and somewhat peculiar work, written in 1716 for the girls of the orphanage where Vivaldi worked, and labeled "A Sacred Military Oratorio." It adapts a story from the apocrypha featuring Juditha, a Jewish widow who, in order to save her embattled city, seduces and later beheads Holofernes , a general of Nebuchadnezzar's army. The libretto by Giacomo Cassetti gets pretty gory -- in one recitative, Judith urges her servant Abra to put the general's severed head in a bag as they make their escape -- and Vivaldi's vocal writing sometimes seems more concerned with florid display than with deeply probing the complexities of his characters' plights. But the music is consistently imaginative -- and occasionally breathtaking -- in its use of orchestral color.

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