Tag: Baroque

Black Opera (2012): Mary Gentle

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★★★

Conrad Scalese is in trouble. It’s around the year 1830 and we meet him in Naples on the morning after he’s watched his new opera Il terrore di Parigi enjoy a stellar success at the Teatro Nuovo. Until just a few hours ago, security, fame and fortune as a librettist beckoned. But since he’s woken up everything has gone wrong. He has a crippling migraine. It turns out that the Teatro Nuovo has been struck by a freak blast of lightning and burned to the ground. People are blaming him for calling down the wrath of God. And the Inquisition are at the door. But all this is just the beginning.

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Orfeo (1607): Claudio Monteverdi

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★★★★

(Royal Opera House in collaboration with the Roundhouse, January 2014)

In 1607 Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, came up with a rather original way to celebrate Carnival at his court. It was inspired by something he’d seen in Florence a few years earlier in 1600, when he’d been a guest at the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France. He’d been deeply impressed by the main entertainment offered at the festivities: a new kind of play, set to music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini (who’d already produced a similar work called Dafne in 1597).

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Partenope (1725): Leonardo Vinci

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Vinci: Partenope

★★★★

(I Turchini with Antonio Florio; recorded at Murcia in 2011)

Partenope (Sonia Prina) is queen and founder of Naples: powerful, majestic… and single. Rather like Elizabeth I of England, she has attracted a swarm of hopeful suitors. For the time being she plays one off against the other while weighing up their comparative merits. There’s Armindo (Stefano Ferrari), prince of Rhodes, who has brought a host of warriors to fight under Partenope’s banner and who languishes in the hope that one day she’ll deign to return his love. But Partenope has a soft spot for his rival, the dashing Arsace of Corinth (Maria Ercolano). As the opera opens, a third suitor arrives: Emilio of Capua (Eufemia Tufano), who crosses Partenope’s borders with his Cumaean army. He helpfully tells her that she has a choice: marry him or fight. Showing satisfying gumption, Partenope disdainfully sends him away and readies her troops for battle.

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La Clemenza di Tito (1791): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Mozart: Clemenza di Tito

★★★★

(Salzburg Festival 2003; Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt)

For my first opera DVD of the new year, I decided it was time to make the acquaintance of Mozart’s Clemenza. This is one of the most popular and frequently filmed operas out there and it can be hard to know where to start; but fortunately there was help on hand in the form of Dehggial, who writes the knowledgeable and deliciously irreverent blog Opera, innit. Dehggial has a particular fondness for Clemenza and recommended this production from the 2003 Salzburg Festival. It’s a rather austere, dark take on the opera with some splendid singing and powerful acting. It was only after buying it that I realised it had been designed by none other than Martin Kušej, which meant there were some interesting links with motifs from the Royal Opera House’s recent Idomeneo.

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Max Emanuel Cencic: Venezia

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Venezia: Max Cencic

(Wigmore Hall, with Il Pomo d’Oro and Riccardo Minasi, 12 December 2014)

First I must apologise for the recent hiatus in my posting. For the last few weeks life has been little more than an extraordinary barrage of events that finally came to a head this week in surreal but glorious fashion. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Now it’s all over and I can slowly get back into my normal rhythm again. There are lots of things that have been going on which I’d love to share with you in due course. And I’m going to kick off with the most recent and the most exhilarating.

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Idomeneo (1780): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Mozart: Idomeneo

★★★

(Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 3-24 November 2014)

The one with the shark

There’s something rather exciting about going to see a production which has divided opinion as starkly as this new staging of Mozart’s Idomeneo. There has been at least one one-star review and one five-star review, but most critics seem to come down somewhere in the middle, struggling in a sea of interesting ideas which never quite come together. I sympathise with them. There were certain things I liked very much and some things I found self-indulgent and silly, but my overall impression was that it was a mixture of promising concepts which lacked the Promethean spark to bring them to life.

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Giulio Cesare (1724): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Giulio Cesare

★★★★★

(Glyndebourne, 2005, directed by Sir David McVicar, conducted by William Christie)

One thing’s for sure. Handel certainly didn’t imagine anything quite like this. With zeppelins hovering over the Alexandrian harbour in the final act and Bollywood-style dance routines thrown into the arias, this production is joyously exuberant and thoroughly addictive. It was the first time I’d watched or heard the opera and it was the perfect introduction: indeed, I ended up feeling quite jealous of the people who’d been able to see it in the flesh.

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L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643): Claudio Monteverdi

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Monteverdi: L'Incoronazione di Poppea

★★★★

(Teatro Real, Madrid, with Les Arts Florissant and William Christie, 2010)

In the wake of the Barbican’s semi-staged Poppea, I decided to have another go at the DVD of this 2010 version from the Teatro Real in Madrid, to see how the two productions compared. It had completely bewildered me first time round. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I enjoyed it much more now that I had a better appreciation of the opera and its context. There are certain elements that I think the Barbican did better, but the Madrid version, with its stellar cast, certainly throws a long shadow. It’s staged, which is a big plus for me; but it completely overshadows the Barbican in one other important way as well.

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A Year in the Life of Handel: 1738 (2014-15)

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Roubillac: Handel

 (Handel House, until 4 January 2015)

In January 1738 an amateur theatre critic reported on the premiere of Handel’s new opera, Faramondo: ‘On Tuesday last, we had a new opera of Handel’s… It is too like his former compositions, and wants variety – I heard his singer that night, and think him near equal in merit to the late Carestini, with this advantage, that he has acquired the happy knack of throwing out a sound, now and then, very like what we hear from a distressed young calf.‘

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A First Visit to Handel House

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Handel House

The Rehearsal Room with its harpsichord

(25 Brook Street, London)

Although I’ve lived and worked in Central London for eight years, I’d never been to Handel House before; but this morning I went to the Queen’s Gallery to see their First Georgians exhibition before it closed, and this offered the perfect complement. All in all, it was a very Georgian day out. The contrast between the two views of 18th-century London was telling. The Queen’s Gallery understandably presents a very elevated view of the period – paintings, furniture, battles and politics – whereas Handel House offers a glimpse of a more down-to-earth, scurrilous, energetic London: a ‘teeming, filthy, vibrant city’, the largest metropolis in Europe, full of appealingly larger-than-life characters. It is only a glimpse, but it leaves you keen to find out more about the personalities you encounter.

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