Tag: Baroque

Xerxes (1738): George Frideric Handel

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Anna Stéphany

★★★★ ½

(Early Opera Company at St John’s Smith Square, 18 November 2016)

With only one production so far this year, I’ve had Xerxes withdrawal symptoms, but fortunately the Early Opera Company and Christian Curnyn were there to save the day with a concert performance at St John’s Smith Square last Friday. This was billed as a concert version of their truly excellent studio recording from 2013, but in fact the entire cast is different, with one crucial exception: Anna Stéphany as the brat-prince himself. The change of cast didn’t matter, however, as EOC drafted in some of the brightest young things around, and the result was classy, perfectly-paced and probably (on balance) the best-sounding Xerxes I’ve yet heard live. Coming from me, that’s high praise.

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Oreste (1734): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Oreste

★★★½

(Royal Opera House at Wilton’s Music Hall, 9 November 2016)

This was my third Handel pasticcio, after Elpidia and Catone in Utica, but it differed from both of these in that Oreste is made up purely of Handel’s own earlier work.  It hung together much more successfully as a result, with melodies that tickled my memory but nothing that shouted its origins elsewhere. It’s the fourth of the Royal Opera House’s Baroque productions that I’ve seen in other venues and, after the immensity of the Roundhouse’s Orfeo and the intimacy of the Sam Wanamaker’s Playhouse’s Ormindo and Orpheus, Wilton’s Music Hall offered an appropriately faded setting for this tale of love and madness at the end of the world.

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Demetrio (1740): Johann Adolph Hasse

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Ray Chenez

★★★

(Opera Settecento at Cadogan Hall, 21 September 2016)

Another long-overdue post finally surfaces from the drafts folder! This time it’s Hasse’s Demetrio, to which I’d been eagerly looking forward. We don’t hear much Hasse in London and Opera Settecento had managed to gather a truly exceptional cast, featuring many of the singers I enthuse about repeatedly on this blog. Erica Eloff, Rupert Charlesworth and Michael Taylor were joined in a casting coup by Ray Chenez, whom I last saw as a manipulative and ultimately tragic Marzia at Versailles. On paper, it couldn’t fail. On the night, however, unsympathetic cutting of the opera resulted in a fragmentary show, which I felt didn’t do justice either to its splendid cast or to Hasse himself.

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Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640): Claudio Monteverdi

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Monteverdi: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

★★★★

(English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire, 15 October 2016)

Most operas are about infatuation: the sudden, all-consuming flare of love that causes kingdoms to fall, mountains to crumble and worlds to change – the love of Paris for Helen, for example. We don’t hear quite so often about the quieter, more enduring kind of love that ‘withstands tempests and is never shaken’. Yet here, in his second surviving opera, Monteverdi does just that. His heroes, Ulysses and Penelope, aren’t tumultuous young things: on the contrary, they’re two people of a certain age, trying to make the best of a bad job. It doesn’t sound terribly dramatic, does it? And it isn’t, if by drama you mean fire and the clash of steel. But it’s one of the most moving stories I’ve seen in opera so far, because it takes the power out of the hands of kings and emperors, and lays bare the workings of the human heart.

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Calisto (1651): Francesco Cavalli

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Cavalli: Calisto

★★★★

(English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire, 14 October 2016)

On Friday night it was time for the second opera in ETO’s autumn Baroque trilogy (the first was their Battle of Britain Xerxes). This time we were going back to the mid-17th century for Cavalli’s Calisto, which on the surface is an exuberant pantomime in song about gods behaving badly in the forests of Arcadia. Beneath the raunchiness, however, this opera has a surprisingly radical message. In a fascinating pre-show talk, the director and conductor Tim Nelson explored allusions to Galileo and the defeat of faith by reason, which – if this isn’t just the result of academic over-reading – would make the apparently frothy Calisto a subversive commentary on the biggest controversy of the day.

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Xerxes (1738): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Xerxes

★★★★

(English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire, 8 October 2016)

Xerxes and Spitfires both rank pretty highly on the list of things I get excited about, but I never imagined I’d have cause to refer to them both in the same sentence. Now that has all changed, thanks to English Touring Opera’s revival production, which transplants our favourite brat-prince to the airfields of the Battle of Britain. It opens with the glorious sight of our misguided king serenading a Spitfire (plane tree – plane – Spitfire – brilliant), as he contemplates his new campaign to rule the skies of Europe, and it’s sheer fun from there on in.

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Eliogabalo (1667): Francesco Cavalli

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Cavalli: Eliogabalo

★★★★

(Opéra de Paris at Palais Garnier, 25 September 2016)

Please forgive the recent silence. This last week was extremely busy which, on one hand, means there was no time to write new posts, but on the other means that you have a glut of them coming up. First off is the most glamorous and exciting event: my trip to the Paris Opéra to see their new production of Cavalli’s Eliogabalo. This was the result of a last-minute (and very expensive) fit of spontaneity, and luckily it turned out that Eliogabalo was just my cup of tea. Focused on a lascivious, unpredictable ruler with a penchant for stealing other people’s girlfriends, it sounds at first very much like Xerxes.

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Alcina (1735): George Frideric Handel

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Alcina: George Frideric Handel

★★★½

(Longborough Festival Opera, Greenwood Theatre, 4 August 2016)

After seeing their impressive Xerxes last year, I was really looking forward to seeing what Longborough Festival Opera would achieve with this year’s Young Artists Production: Alcina. Let’s face it, the one version I’ve seen so far was often striking in the wrong way. And I wasn’t disappointed. Stripping their set back to basics, the company conjured up all the strangeness and danger of Alcina’s enchanted island in a production which, for me, evoked strong parallels with The Tempest. Sung in the original Italian and boasting some fine performances, it was a very welcome counterbalance to the exuberant but somewhat alarming Aix version, restoring ethereal magic to the heart of the story.

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Elpidia (1725): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Elpidia

★★★½

(Opera Settecento, St George’s Hanover Square, 31 March 2016)

Herewith another post from the depths of the drafts folder, which I hope still may be of some interest. I’m keen to post it because I’m a great fan of Opera Settecento’s habit of unearthing rare and unusual operas and this performance featured some of my favourite young singers. Many apologies for its lateness, but it all happened around the time of my uncle’s death and I wasn’t really up to blogging at the time. But I had a few scribbled thoughts and wanted to jostle them into some sense of order, so that I can have a record of this enjoyable and particularly complex pasticcio.

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Ercole sul Termodonte (1723): Antonio Vivaldi

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Vivaldi: Ercole sul Termodonte

★★★½

(Spoleto Festival, 2006, Il Complesso Barocco with Alan Curtis)

We’ve discussed, on a previous occasion, the indignities inflicted on opera singers, but the sadomasochism of Alcina has just been comprehensively trumped. I’d like to say that one remembers this production of Ercole sul Termodonte for its wonderful music, or for the simple and effective set designs, or for the generally admirable cast. But this would be disingenuous. Cast, crew and orchestra must have known, from the moment they began rehearsals, that this opera would be remembered forever for Zachary Stains performing the title role of Ercole stark naked, with nothing to preserve his modesty except the occasional fortuitous shadow cast by the paws of his lion-skin cloak.

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