Cesti - La Dori (Innsbruck, 2019)

Pietro Antonio Cesti - La Dori (Innsbruck, 2019)

Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, 2019

Ottavio Dantone, Stefano Vizioli, Francesca Ascioti, Rupert Enticknap, Federico Sacchi, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, Emőke Baráth, Bradley Smith, Pietro Di Bianco, Alberto Allegrezza

Naxos - Blu-ray

Considering that it was first performed in 1657 and the plot is almost impenetrable, you'd be forgiven thinking that only half of Cesti's opera La Dori had survived. It's actually one of those early operas that has a complicated backstory that is almost as long as the opera itself; its revelations thrown out there only in the last few minutes of the opera. In some cases you wonder even whether it isn't the better part of the opera that has been left out. With a bit of preparation about the history of the characters however, it doesn't take long to see why the focus of the opera is mostly in the aftermath of the more dramatic part of the story, nor see the qualities that Cesti is able to bring to the then still developing art form of opera.

Including the backstory on the opera would in fact probably only make La Dori more difficult than easier to follow. It's one of those stories (see Shakespeare's late Romances for other examples) where babies are stolen by pirates, where princesses get lost at sea, where identities are switched and where everyone important feels the need for obscure reasons to change their identity by adopting a disguise as someone of the opposite sex. If you factor in that the singer can be a woman playing a man's role who switches to a female disguise and vice-versa, (the use of castrati in the original only complicating the matter further), then really it's better off just getting a vague idea of who the characters are, who they are in love with and the torment it causes them trying to do the right thing for the person they love.

If you're happy enough you've got a basic handle on that then you won't be too concerned about following the various obstacles and additional familiar complications thrown their way. And, rather, you will see why Cesti and his librettist Apolloni choose to commence the story of La Dori at the point it does. It's not about creating action drama as much as human drama in music that carries the sense of backstory within the characters, following through on the path that fate has placed before them. In some baroque opera they stay in this conflicted state until fate or a deus ex machina resolves their dilemma and re-establishes order. That's not necessarily how Cesti treats them in his opera.

There's a greater sense of the human agency here, where the disguises they wear are only a means to suggest that there is more to them than they seem to outward appearances. They carry the troubles that fate has left them and face up to the challenges in front of them and strive to turn things around. There's a richness and strength of personality in each that you can be sure will win through diversity. If that is able to come through despite the complications of the plot, it's down to Cesti's music and the way he uses it to progress the development of the characters and the drama, notably in the use of aria and arioso, expanding the language of opera away from expositional recitative.

In terms of plotting it may seem like La Dori is filled with familiar devices that now seem contrived and lacking credibility, but it's here that those devices were first played out and would have a major influence on opera in the following century. If you can look beyond the magic death potion being switched for a love potion in Tristan und Isolde and instead relate to the depth of feelings that are revealed instead  by this device, you should have no problem that an identical switch takes place here. True, this comes on top of a lot of identity and gender switching and a complicated backstory, as well as early baroque conventions like the lusty comic nurse Dirce, but again these are just ways of getting through that everyone, young and old, commoners and royals, have such feelings and ensure similar troubles.

It's not as if you have to work out the knots of a convoluted plot then, since the music makes the characters real and convincing, all the more so when they are sung well in this 2019 production at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music. Some of the most complicated identities in fact are not necessarily the expected principals, Dori or Arsinoe the bride who is to marry Oronte in her stead since Dori was stolen by pirates. Take Celinda for example, Arsinoe's maid who is actually Dori's brother Tolomeo, in disguise as a woman who has (as a man) fallen in love with Arsinoe. You have someone like Emőke Baráth singing this and suddenly, like Mozart a century later, you can see that there is no such thing as secondary characters but everyone has an equal and important part to play in the drama of life.

Which evidently is to take nothing away from the other characters and singers who are all equally wonderful. The expression of the characters and their development, shown through the singing, is what holds you in the drama not despite the plot, but as the plot. Oronte's early appearances - lyrically sung by countertenor Rupert Enticknap - all carry a sense of elegance and forbearance on his entrances, only to become imperious and irritable at not being able to control events. Alongside Alessandro Melani, also recently revived with L'Empio Punito, an eye-opening early version of Don Giovanni, with Cesti you can see that Handel's mastery and refinement of Italian opera didn't exactly come out of nowhere.

As with any early opera with a complicated plot and a less familiar form, it can be a challenge to stage something like this in a way that helps engage and audience, but the Innsbruck production directed by Stefano Vizioli does it very well. The period settles for a classical 17th century version of antiquity, period costumes and a kind of palatial room that opens out into Babylonian sands and skies, the director making great use of light and colour to accompany the musical expression.

There's much of historical value in the work, but primarily the performance here is fascinating just to hear the music Cesti composed played and with Ottavio Dantone on harpsichord conducting the Accademia Bizantina on period instruments, it sounds incredible here. There's a real kick to the music, the rhythms that comes across exceptionally well with pristine clarity and detail in the Hi-Res LPCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 mixes. There are no extras on the Blu-ray but the booklet contains a tracklist, an essay on the history of the work and an absolutely essential synopsis. It's an all-region BD50, with subtitles in  Italian, English, German, Japanese and Korean.

Links: Innsbruck Festival of Early Music

Mercadante - Didone Abbandonata (Innsbruck, 2018)

Saverio Mercadante - Didone Abbandonata

Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, 2018

Alessandro De Marchi, Jürgen Flimm, Viktorija Miškūnaitė, Katrin Wundsam, Emilie Renard, Carlo Vincenzo Allemano, Diego Godoy, Pietro Di Bianco

Naxos - Blu-ray

The idea of a 19th century composer working with a very old Pietro Metastasio text set by many baroque composers is an intriguing one. A composer like Verdi however was keen put some distance between the indulgences of a bel canto era which was still indebted to its 18th century past, beyond even Rossini, the most progressive composer of that era. Somewhere in there however, largely overlooked and unjustly neglected is Saverio Mercadante, and yet it is in Mercadante and particularly in a work like Didone Abbandonata, that you can definitely see the building of the bridge that Verdi was later able to cross to take Italian opera decisively into the new century.

That connection between Verdi and Mercadante might be more evident in a later work like Il Bravo, seen recently at Wexford Festival Opera (one of the few champions of Mercadante in the opera world), but Didone Abbandonata from 1823 opens up a whole new way of viewing his place in Italian opera. Taken up by the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music with a care towards historically-informed period instruments and performance - which means tuning down from the 20th century standard - this production aims to give the work an authenticity of sound that has done much in the past to present Handel and other baroque works in a new light.

So to return to that initial thought - how would early 19th century opera working with a Metastasio libretto sound? Well in fairness it sounds a lot like Donizetti; constrained to a certain extent by a structure dictated by Metastasio's libretto towards a standard cavatina, aria and recitative arrangement. Mercadante never lets that get in the way of creativity however, the libretto reworked by Andrea Leone Tottola, finding lovely settings for cavatinas, duets, trios and choruses that place his own stamp on the work. That character is more evident here since the period instruments unquestionably give prominence and space for the voice to be much more expressive.

In Didone Abbandonata, the focus in the cavatinas and duets is on expression rather than ornamentation and there's rather unusually only one brief aria in the whole first half of the opera and it's Araspe, a secondary character, who sings it. In Act II likewise the few brief arias are little more than minor adornments. It's perhaps a bit much then to expect Mercadante to be able to provide a profound examination of human feelings and situations when tied to 18th century operatic mannerisms, improbable twists and lack of naturalism in situations, but dispensing with the longeurs of the da capo, Mercadante drives everything purposefully towards showpiece rondos and the finales at the end of each of the two acts.

Fundamentally, Didone Abbandonata relies - as it did with Purcell in Dido and Aeneas and as it would also with Berlioz in Les Troyens à Carthage - on the human tragedy of a woman's deep love, hopes and fidelity all dashed by a lover's desertion. It's not so much that Dido feels betrayed by Aeneas choosing the duty over love - she's not the first woman and won't be the last one in opera to suffer that fate - as much as it does touch on a deeper psychological experience (one that Dmitri Tcherniakov alluded to a little heavy-handedly in his recent Paris production of Berlioz's Les Troyens) where human sentiments are crushed by a rush towards fate, the will of the gods or whatever you want to call the hand of history.

Mercadante does his bit to create that essential tragedy, but there remains the challenge of finding a suitable stage representation that suits the subject and the musical treatment. Director Jürgen Flimm attempts a kind of half-way house between early 18th century in the military costumes and modern in some of the props - a cement mixer, a fridge, guns, bullet-proof vests - on a rotating stage with a concrete bunker at one corner. There's little that points to the ancient legend, Aeneas even appearing to be preparing for his departure in a canoe with some travelling cases, but yet there is a classical feel to the situation, not striving for naturalism or realism as much as attuning the drama to the varied tones of the work that Mercadante applies.

Some of this is consequently of doubtful character - Flimm for example has Iarbas carry out his sacking of Carthage like he's playing a jazz-hands music-hall song and dance routine - but again the desired impact is very definitely achieved. Iarbas - very well sung by Carlo Vincenzo Allemano, even if the dancing around leaves him a little breathless - does have a greater role to play in this version of Virgil's Aeneid. Flimm's depiction of the wholesale slaughter enacted by Iarbas rampaging through the smoking ruins of Carthage at the conclusion and even involved in the death of Dido, does capture a sense of the complete loss and devastation of the Queen of Carthage's world, abandoned not just by Aeneas, but by everyone. There's nothing left but death.

Whether Mercadante's music has the necessary strength to carry that alone it's hard to say, but Alessandro De Marchi's conducting of the Academia Montis Regalis is authoritative and attuned to the situations and overall pace and rhythm. His interview in the enclosed booklet is highly informative on how a complete edition of the score was assembled and how the authentic early 19th century sound contributes to the character of the work. The singing is also impressive throughout, with a superb performance in particular from mezzo-soprano Katrin Wundsam in the trouser role of Aeneas, demonstrating impeccable control over the complete range with dramatic swoops from high to low. Her Act II rondò is just stunning.

Recorded live at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music in 2018, Didone Abbandonata comes across well on the Naxos BD50 Blu-ray disc. The HD image is initially quite dark with high contrast due to the lighting, but the clarity is more evident in Act II. The DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 and PCM 2.0 soundtracks provide two very different listening experiences. The surround giving more space to the instruments, the stereo giving much more presence to the singing. There are no extras on the disc, but good contextual information and a synopsis in the enclosed booklet. The BD is all-region compatible and there are subtitles in German, English, French, Japanese and Korean.

Links: Innsbruck Festival of Early Music