Another Freschi Opera From Ars Minerva

For seven years Ars Minerva has been presenting “modern world premieres,” performing operas from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that lapsed into obscurity as new styles of performance began to emerge through composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. More often than not, the composers of that past have been as unfamiliar as the operas themselves. Nevertheless, those of us following the annual Ars Minerva offerings had no trouble encountering composers whose efforts had been previously unknown.

 

Nicolas Garcia, Leslie Katter (in the title role of Olimpia), and Sara Couden (photograph by Valentina Sadiul, courtesy of Ars Minerva)

In that context 2021 constituted a bit of a landmark. That year’s opera was Messalina, composed by Carlo Pallavicino, who had also composed the second opera in Ars Minerva’s history, The Amazons in the Fortunate Isles, which was presented in 2016. This year’s opera was given its first performance last night. Olimpia Vendicata (Olympia avenged) is the second opera in the Ars Minerva repertoire to have been composed by Domenico Freschi, the first having been Ermelinda, performed in 2019.

These two operas have different librettists, Francesco Maria Piccioli for Ermelinda and Francesco Aurelio Aureli for Olimpia Vendicata; but they both involve no end of entanglements in affairs of the heart. Those entanglements are so abundant that one can pretty much dispense with the narrative summary in the program book and just take every confused relationship as it comes. What matters most is the rapid-pace unfolding of events, skillfully managed by the staging of Ars Minerva Executive Artistic Director and Founder Céline Ricci.

If negotiating those events themselves runs the risk of being problematic, one can always depend on the music to lead the way. All those entangled relationships involve a generous number of characters in the cast. However, Pallavicino provides a rich abundance of solo arias through which we get to know each of those characters personally. Indeed, it is the clarity of those personalities that facilitates efforts to follow the basic steps of the overall plot, leaving the details to be elaborated by aria singing that communicates more through music than through words.

Fortunately, the music was in excellent hands through the efforts of Matthew Dirst, who conducted from the harpsichord. The remaining ensemble consisted of one-to-a-part performances. Violinist Cynthia Black served as Concertmaster with Laura Jeannin as second violin and Daria D’andrea on viola. Continuo was provided by Gretchen Claassen on cello, Farley Pearce on violone, and Richard Savino on theorbo. The transparency of the instrumentation significantly facilitated recognizing the personal qualities of each of the characters expressing themselves through solo arias. Due to the complexity of the plot, the vocalists themselves are too numerous to mention; but their dramatic types were skillfully etched into the memories of those of us on audience side.