About a month ago Deutsche Grammophon (DG) released a three-CD album of George Frideric Handel’s HWV 40 opera Serse (usually better known by its English title Xerxes). This is a historically-informed performance with Maxim Emelyanychev conducting the instrumental ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro, the choral resources of Cantica Symphonia, prepared by Artistic Director Giuseppe Maletto, and a cast of seven vocal soloists, all of whom are clearly sensitive to eighteenth-century practices. Where the Baroque repertoire is concerned, HWV 40 tends to be known as a “one hit opera,” since the most, if not only, familiar music comes from the opening aria “Ombra mai fu.”
The title page of the accompanying booklet identifies the work as “Dramma per musica in tre otti” (drama with music in three acts), an attribution I was unable to find in any of the score source material on IMSLP. The author of the opera’s Wikipedia page classifies it simply as “an opera seria in three acts.” However, when I saw the opera performed by the San Francisco Opera in the fall of 2011, I found Nicholas Hytner’s staging to provide the funniest account of a Handel opera I had ever seen (at least at that time). Here is how I described it, using A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a point of departure, when I wrote about it for Examiner.com:
The whole scenario is a muddle of who-loves-whom, which is so difficult to explain (with or without a straight face) that the author of the synopsis in the program note felt obliged to illustrate it with a diagram. Furthermore, on the surface, the whole affair is little more than lord-what-fools-these-mortals-be confusion without the interference of William Shakespeare’s fairies.
Apparently, the idea of comedy being presented in a musical style generally associated with seria rhetoric did not go down well in eighteenth-century London. The first production on April 15, 1738 was a failure. As Charles Burney, best known as the author of A General History of Music, published as a series of four books between 1776 and 1789, put it, “here is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it, which Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio had banished from serious opera.” As far as Burney was concerned, the idea that Serse not be taken seriously in the first place was out of the question.
Nevertheless, this new recording does not try to play up the buffoonery, which is probably just as well. Whether or not Hytner intended to take Midsummer as a point of departure, his staging shared with the better productions of Shakespeare’s play a calculated sense of how to deploy sight gags. Given only the music, one would do better simply to enjoy the diverse palette of relationships between voices and instruments that unfold over the opera’s three acts.
Furthermore, the packaging seems to have been designed to present Argentinian countertenor Franco Fagioli as the center of attention. Since his is the title role, his is also the first voice we hear in that most recognizable aria “Ombra mai fu;” and there is no question that he delivers a thoroughly ravishing account with just the right attention to adding his own embellishments. Unless one consults the words themselves, one would not suspect that this is a love song to a shade tree (although the cover photograph of the album manages to find a way to give that topic a slightly disturbing erotic twist).
from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed
Nevertheless, this is a recording in which all hands contribute to a historically-informed performance that is so well-paced that one is unlikely to tire of the da capo arias. (Indeed, one of the distinctive features of HWV 40 is that not all of the arias have that ternary da capo structure.) One can particularly appreciate bass Biagio Pizzuti’s account of the servant Elviro, who is definitely the most explicitly comic character in the narrative. Most important, however, is the crystal clarity that every note Handel committed to paper enjoys, whether it emerges in an aria, a chorus, or a recitative passage. Conducting from the harpsichord, Emelyanychev is definitely up there with the well-informed Handel interpreters; and I, for one, will be looking forward to his first visit to San Francisco.
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