Photo: Fabrizio Sansoni / Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

So, Pride @ parterre brings you Carlo Vistoli and Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen performing “Ah mio caro” from Floridante, a rare, if not unique, Handel love duet for two altos.

The original text includes the exchange “Ah mia cara/Ah mio caro” but this ravishing performance from a “Three Countertenors” concert at the Rome Opera in fall 2023 tweaks it so that each man addresses the other as “caro.”

For the record, their social media reveals that Vistoli has a husband, Cohen a wife (and, as of recently, a baby).

Vistoli again exchanges “caros,” this time with Hugh Cutting, another rising countertenor, in the closing duet from Vivaldi’s La Gloria e Imeneo on a brand-new CD from Harmonia Mundi from Les Arts Florissants called Nei Giardini d’Amore.

Handel: Floridante, “Ah mio caro”

Carlo Vistoli
Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen

Conductor: Rinaldo Alessandrini
Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma
20 October 2023
Broadcast