France Competition d’Aix-en-Provence 2025 [1] – Cavalli, La Calisto: Soloists, Ensemble Correspondances / Sébastien Daucé (conductor). Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Aix-en-Provence, 7.7.2025. (MB)
Opera’s relationship to broader social and political actions is, like that of all cultural phenomena, complicated, although typically clearer than in different instances. This holds not less than as a lot for efficiency as for creation. Likelihood – the proper individual or individuals on the proper time, or certainly the mistaken individual(s) on the mistaken time – can at all times play a task, albeit normally together with different components. The world of seventeenth-century Venetian opera, of late Monteverdi and his pupil Francesco Cavalli, likely held a specific enchantment for the Europe (and United States) of the Sixties and Seventies and altering social mores: ladies’s and homosexual liberation, repudiation of monogamy, and so forth — simply because the more and more standard Così fan tutte did.
But so did the singular determine of Raymond Leppard. With out him, it’s troublesome to think about Cavalli having reached Glyndebourne when he did: first L’Ormindo (1967-8, on the again of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and receiving a subsequent visitor go to to Munich in 1969) after which La Calisto (1970, 1971, and 1974, with visitor appearances within the UK and continental Europe within the meantime). We should always in all probability have approached Cavalli’s music in some unspecified time in the future in any other case, but this was the trail taken. Leppard’s landmark recordings of these two operas, mixed with editions and performances of different works, did a lot to determine them in a public consciousness that itself appeared prepared for his or her decidedly un-Victorian (certainly un-Nineteen Fifties) morality. The ultimate duet of Poppea is a locus classicus of ‘amoral’ conclusion, or quite elevation of ‘love’, need, no matter you want to name it, over all else; it was in fact virtually actually not composed by Monteverdi and should certainly have been the work of Cavalli. At any fee, it units the scene properly for works similar to La Calisto, given an intriguing, feminist directorial twist at its shut right here by Jetske Mijnssen.
If the route has taken inevitable detours, Cavalli could now be heard commonly internationally. The Competition d’Aix-en-Provence gave L’Erismena in 2017 (evaluation right here) a welcome alternative, although La Calisto is to my thoughts the extra attention-grabbing and involving opera (and right here acquired a significantly superior manufacturing and efficiency). That Glyndebourne Calisto was in fact one among Janet Baker’s nice triumphs, within the function of Diana, mercifully captured for the remainder of us on file with Leppard, the London Philharmonic, and a usually splendid solid. We will hear there an absorbing conception of what Cavalli may sound like and as soon as did, but we should always usually resist nostalgia and focus on what we would do immediately, a activity rendered simpler by what might be the best efficiency of an opera on interval devices I’ve skilled within the flesh. It additionally takes its place in that fraught but fascinating historical past of why Cavalli’s works normally and this specifically may maintain enchantment to audiences at sure occasions, providing a much more erotic expertise than every other I can recall, while nonetheless inevitably pointing to historic distinction. The world of La Calisto just isn’t ours, whether or not in morality or conceptions of gender, although it in all probability comes nearer than it does to the worlds of La traviata or Tosca.
Consciously or in any other case (it does not likely matter), that rigidity got here by way of in Mijnssen’s staging. Initially I questioned, with out particularly minding, why it had been up to date to a luxurious eighteenth century, to a world of a decadent the Aristocracy redolent of Les Liaisons dangereuses, but it grew to become clear that this was meant to invoke – and did – a world of experimentation in sexual attraction in addition to luxurious and decadence virtually for their very own sake. Bored, merciless gods turn out to be bored, merciless aristocrats, maybe thereby awaiting their comeuppance. With a set from Julia Katharina Berndt, whose impression of wooden panelling conveys foundations of greater than a century earlier, extra normal distance from and roots in that ancient times are readily obvious. Social differentiation is obvious within the case of Endimione, a commedia dell’arte singer performing for the pleasure of his divine viewers: at their mercy (or not). It appears, nonetheless, much less clear within the case of Calisto, whose costume advised equality with the gods. Maybe that’s the level, but if that have been the case, I’m not positive why it not so throughout the board. It’s nonetheless clear in her punishment by Giunone, reworked not right into a bear, it appears, however a pauper in sackcloth: maybe the last word shame, whether or not in lack of wealth or implied penitence. Hers, it appears, may really be a Christian presence in a world dominated by wicked paganism.
In any other case, video games, disguises, transformation, and violence lengthen from starting to finish, particularly by the hands of the shepherd Endimione’s sylvan persecutors: bookended by a prophetic funeral, gods in mourning, and a closing scene wherein, to our shock and the gods’, Calisto activates Giove and kills him. The scene frozen, funeral music sounds. Is that this the loss of life of Giove in human kind – it appears greater than that – or a fuller loss of life enabled by his transformation into human kind? If the chief of the gods dies – can die – what may the longer term maintain? Extra awkward are questions of gender transformation. A manufacturing can’t be held totally answerable for viewers response, in fact, and there was a sure ingredient that will in all probability have discovered male assumption of feminine roles, not to mention a male god assuming his daughter’s kind, intrinsically hilarious, it doesn’t matter what; I worry some such folks may even have felt and reacted equally to any suggestion of lesbianism. That mentioned, particularly within the case of gender fluidity, the manufacturing was not totally harmless of encouragement. Which will have roots within the work; it actually has roots within the story of Cavalli’s Venetian operas. If, although, we may have a feminist twist, a broader gender twist may additionally have helped. One other plus, although: we had dancing, even when comedic, that listened to and responded to the music quite than merely inflicting itself upon it. Many because of choreographer Dustin Klein for that rarer-than-it-should be boon.
Sébastien Daucé led the Ensemble Correspondances with flexibility, a eager sense of dramatic narrative, and an equally wonderful sense of sensuality: simply what was referred to as for — and with no trace of dogmatism. A wonderfully different – at all times with discernible motive – continuo group proved the muse on which a lot else rested, together with what might be the sweetest toned ‘interval’ strings I’ve heard while retaining capability for delicacy, and cornetts that managed each to have an effect on and to carry their tuning within the out of doors theatre of Aix’s archepiscopal palace. I solely learn this afterwards, however how refreshing to listen to an early-music conductor take note of simply what must be in efficiency: ‘On that foundation – i.e. all these completely different eventualities that stay open within the rating – we’ll provide you with a theoretical line-up, an adaptation of the counterpoint, of the intermediate components, and so on., however with out ever touching what already exists.’
That latter level could also be thought conservative by some requirements, but it’s removed from absurdly so. Extra necessary, ‘this adaptation implies that our model will sound much less just like the one carried out in Venice in 1651 than the one which may have been carried out as a substitute of Ercole amante in Paris in 1661 [1662, but no matter],’ commissioned by Cardinal Mazarin in celebration of Louis XIV’s marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain.
‘The concept is to have a five-part rating that makes better use of the instrumentalists and is appropriate for an out of doors venue with a capability of round 1300. When it was premiered, there have been a mean of 100 folks per night. Whereas we can not merely apply a coefficient based mostly on the variety of spectators, as a result of the acoustics additionally play a task in how the music is heard [Amen to that!], it’s secure to say that there shall be not less than ten occasions as many instrumentalists, i.e. an orchestra of 60 musicians. We’re not fairly there but, however that’s the concept! …till we’ve got examined them on the Archevêché, we gained’t know if we’ve got too many or too few of this or that instrument.’
It’s refreshing not solely to learn these phrases, but in addition all of the extra so refreshing, stimulating, and albeit overdue to listen to their musical ends in a world that also principally insists on pitifully small forces fairly unmatched to performing areas, not to mention to twenty-first-century ears. I hope to listen to extra from Daucé and his ensemble, who while not in any significant approach sounding ‘like’ Leppard and his musicians, appear extra attuned to his and to the work’s creators’ artistic, extra correctly historic anti-puritanism than the better a part of what we’ve got heard over the intervening half-century. ‘Inauthentic’ but atmospherically Mediterranean percussion main us into the interval would absolutely have stunned Leppard, but made him smile. Cavalli too, I ought to prefer to assume.
A great variety of the solid shall be acquainted to those that have seen earlier instalments of seventeenth-century Venetian opera, Monteverdi and Cavalli, in Aix, a lot in order that one can virtually communicate of an Aix Venetian ensemble with a mutable core, quite as as soon as one may for Salzburg and Mozart. That have tells, I believe, as does its developmental nature. All singers appeared absolutely at dwelling in Giovanni Faustini’s libretto, Cavalli’s response, and that of their twenty-first century manufacturing and musical crew too.
Lauranne Oliva gave a touching efficiency of the title function, rising in metal, but finally true to the character’s innocence, properly supported as elsewhere by Hannah Clark’s costumes. Alex Rosen’s essentially multifaceted Giove took in not solely countertenor assumption of Diana’s kind, however more and more robust hints of one thing deeper than his fellow deities might need understood. Diana herself benefited from a comprehending, versatile assumption, divine but what we all know as human, from Giuseppina Bridelli, however lack of alternative to behave as Giove. Anna Bonitatibus supplied an imperious star-turn as Giunone, lifting each scene wherein she appeared insofar as that have been potential. Dominic Sedgwick’s Mercurio was fairly the energising presence, certainly correctly mercurial. My decide of the remainder must embrace Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian’s really human, lovelorn Endimione and a strutting, peacock Satirino from his fellow countertenor Théo Imart. This premiere, nonetheless, confirmed that nonetheless clichéd the expression could also be by now, this was an organization efficiency, very rather more than the sum of its considerable components from 1651 onwards.
Mark Berry
