10/9/2019 Creation Master 09 Rinaldo Handel
Handel wrote Rinaldo to knock ’em dead. It was 1710, and he had just arrived in London with a reputation as a keyboard virtuoso, mostly won in Italy. He had hung around princely courts in Germany. He was 25, and he wanted to make a splash, to conquer England at a stroke.
. Share:. ZURICH, Switzerland The new jet-set production of Handel's 'Rinaldo' at the Zurich Opera left a large segment of the audience pretty much dumbfounded. Director Jens-Daniel Herzog shifted the action from Jerusalem around the time of the First Crusade (1096-1099) to an airport luxury lounge and conference center, more than a wee bit later than the First Crusade. Rinaldo, the Christian warrior, wears a double-breasted navy blazer, needs a drink and gets frustrated when an elevator door closes on him. Characters go up and down on-stage escalators, and the set spins to show various areas of the lounge and terminal. There is a dissection of a small, white furry animal, a large snake, some allusions to Bond girls and character transformations.
The Christians pull guns on the Muslims at a signing ceremony. It was outrageous and entertaining. It had little to do with the opera that premiered in London in 1711. This isn't the first time an opera has been time-shifted with an aeronautic theme. Peter Sellars' 1988 staging of Wagner's 'Tannhaeuser' at the Lyric Opera of Chicago was moved from 13th-century Thuringia to an airport. Herzog's staging, based on a concept from Claus Guth, opened June 15. Based on Wednesday's second performance, it's not an easy night for the audience, which was either so mesmerized or stupefied that a large segment was unsure whether to applaud when scenes ended.
The glue that held the night together was conductor William Christie, who drew a sublime performance from the Orchestra La Scintilla of the Zurich Opera. At the beginning, the on-stage action is confusing, given its disconnect from Giacomo Rossi's libretto. Goffredo, the Christian captain, is in a gray, chalk-striped suit. The 'army' is six businessmen and two businesswomen who pirouette with their attache cases.
Eustazio, Goffredo's brother, is a Johnny Depp look-alike wearing a morning coat and sunglasses. Argante, the Saracen king, is in a suit and tan kufi, a crocheted prayer cap. Armida, the Queen of Damascus and a sorceress, prefers red slip dresses and red patent leather shoes (which she uses to kick Argante in a delicate area) but later transforms herself into Almirena, Goffredo's daughter, who goes for white dresses and a Grace Kelly head scarf. Mago, the Christian magician, appears to be a homeless person hanging around the airport with a white light saber. In the intimate Opernhaus Zurich, which seats about 1,100, singers could be heard easily with no need to bellow.
Soprano Malin Hartelius gave an over-the-top performance as Armida, who with fiendish facial expressions gets to have the most fun. Soprano Ann Helen Moen was a sweet-voiced Almirena and was moving in the opera's most-famous aria, 'Lascia ch'io pianga.' Mezzo-soprano Juliette Galstian, singing the title role for the first time during this run, had a lot to compete with in the busy staging but exhibited a clarion voice and winning ability to draw empathy. Soprano Liliana Nikiteanu was slimy as Goffredo, and contralto Katharina Peetz looked like a Tim Burton creation as Eustazio.
Bass-baritone Ruben Drole was menacing as Argante. Christian Schmidt's vividly modern sets and costumes, and Ramses Sigl's constantly whirling choreography left the greatest impact.
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Some might consider it Eurotrash, others great fun. All will find it memorable.
On the Net: (This version CORRECTS that Herzog's staging opened June 15, sted June 14.) Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
It was the work with which conquered London, the Italian opera that finally wooed a suspicious English audience to the charms of Dr Johnson’s “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Three hundred years later, neither Rinaldo nor London’s audience has changed much. The opera is still a musical patchwork of greatest hits loosely stitched together with an outrageous Crusading plot, while the opera-going crowd still doesn’t mind at all, so long as it comes with a good bit of spectacle and some baroque razzle-dazzle – both of which were abundantly supplied at the by Harry Bicket and his superb players.
In the absence of the mermaids, fire-breathing dragons and live flock of sparrows that caused a stir in 1711, the thrills were strictly musical in this concert performance, but Bicket and his team are wizards of another hue, and their enchantments would have given any Armida a run for her money, with or without a Saracen army in tow. First there were the trumpets – four of them – battering us with a fusillade of power and agility, setting the scene for Luca Pisaroni’s gloriously villainous entrance-aria “Sibilar gli angui d’Aletto”. Then it was the strings, announcing “Furie terribili” in a hot cloud of semiquaver sparks, before Tabea Debus coaxed liquid-throated loveliness from her recorder in the trilling, warbling obbligato for Almirena’s “Augelletti che cantate”, and cellist Joseph Crouch offered his delicate, rhetorical commentary to Goffredo’s “Sorge nel petto'. But that was all a mere preamble to Tom Foster’s harpsichord interludes in “Vo’ far guerra” – episodes Handel himself originally improvised, and which here bent the sonic drama into an entirely new shape, gleefully, wittily, impossibly surreal in their harmonic game of free-association. Who needs a flock of sparrows when you have the swarming agility of Foster’s counterpoint – an aural murmuration of staggering skill? We’ve come to expect outstanding casts from these performances, but this one was notable not just for its established stars, but for a number of new names and less familiar faces.
We don’t see nearly enough of mezzo Sasha Cooke in the UK, and while the role of patriarch Goffredo sits unhelpfully low in her register, the da capos did give us some tantalising glimpses of this syrup-rich voice. Recently signed by Warner, the 27-year-old Polish countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski ( pictured above) is an exciting find, making an event out of Eustazio’s nothing of an aria “Siam prossimi”, and projecting his bright, light voice with ease in the Barbican’s awkward acoustic. Young British countertenor Owen Willetts also made a late impression as the Christian Magus.
Coloratura soprano Jane Archibald was all vocal thunderbolts and lightning flashes as Armida, holding her own against the polished theatrical creation that is Pisaroni’s slippery Argante – almost, but never quite, succumbing to pantomime. But Joelle Harvey’s Almirena refused to let the bad girl have all the fun, disarming any opposition with the restraint and simplicity of her “Lascia ch’io pianga”. If Iestyn Davies’s full-bodied “Cara sposa” felt like a missed opportunity for introspection and inwardness for the opera’s cardboard cut-out of a hero, his “Abbruggio, avampo, e fremo” and “Or la tromba” showed him at his best – spurring on the English Concert’s trumpets with his gilded breadth of tone and light-footed ease. If there were moments during the performance where Bicket’s ensemble swayed under pressure, some uncharacteristic smudges and tensions in the texture, these felt like a price worth paying for an evening of music-making that sustained something of the manic, improvisatory energy of Foster’s solos throughout – music-making that was anything but safe, rich in both risks and rewards.
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