Lampe
The Dragon of Wantley
Mary Bevan, Catherine Carby, Mark Wilde, John Savournin; The Brook Street Band/John Andrews
Resonus RES10304 107:56 mins (2 discs)
Even crotchety King George II loved The Dragon of Wantley, a bold 1730s spoof of Italian opera. Librettist Henry Carey originally conceived The Dragon, its action based loosely on a Yorkshire folk ballad, as a mock-Handelian oratorio for the celebrated Kitty Clive. Thwarted by Drury Lane’s manager, Carey and composer John F Lampe mounted their work independently, with opera now the genre of elite taste to be deflated. Carey shoehorned standard tropes satirical of dramma per musica – an absurd hero, two jealous prima donnas, an illogical happy ending – into his story of a drunken knight who, as the champion of rival lovers, kills a rampaging dragon by kicking its bottom. Carey’s satire inspired Lampe to heights of bravura writing and succulent scoring that he never scaled again.
John Andrews shrewdly reserves buffoonery for the
