Antonio Vivaldi - Dorilla in Tempe
Wexford Festival Opera, 2019
Andrea Marchiol, Fabio Ceresa, Manuela Custer, Marco Bussi, Veronique Valdés, Josè Maria Lo Monaco, Rosa Bove, Laura Margaret Smith, Rebecca Hardwick, Lizzie Holmes, Meriel Cunningham, Emma Lewis
National Opera House, Wexford - 30 October 2019
For a festival that is dedicated to the rediscovery and revival of rarely performed opera there hasn't been a baroque opera performed at the Wexford Festival Opera for thirty years. True, it's a specialised genre that doesn't always appeal to modern tastes, but there are many neglected composers from this period worthy of attention and Vivaldi surely worthier than most. With a distinct flavour and character, an adventurous treatment of a Vivaldi opera is capable of overcoming the challenges of staging opera seria.
Dorilla in Tempe is recognisably classic Vivaldi right from its energised opening notes and from its reworking of music from The Four Seasons for its Spring opening sequence. We're still in the classic opera seria realm of mythology with love affairs being directed by the whim of god's and cruel twists of fate, which brings with it more than a little element of potential for spectacle and drama. Add Vivaldi's charged rhythms to that and you would think it's hard to go wrong, and yet the Wexford Festival Opera production, a co-production with La Fenice in Venice, doesn't quite manage to inject a great deal of life into the opera.
Musically however under the direction of Andrea Marchiol the percussive rhythmic sound of the period instruments of the harpsichord, theorbo and baroque cello bound out of the slightly raised pit and resound wonderfully around the theatre of the National Opera House in Wexford. There's little of the longeurs of recitative and long-winded da capo arias, Vivaldi allowing the drama to flow along without unnecessary stops and starts arias, without the formalism of elaborate entrances and exits, although there are one or two colourful divergences from the plot for the sake of pasticcio arias such as Filindo's hunting song added into the only version we have of Vivaldi's original score.
Fabio Ceresa's production doesn't have a great deal more to bring to the opera than a sense of otherworldly mythological elegance. Massimo Checchetto's set is based around an Alma-Tadema-like classical staircase which is fitting and looks bright and beautiful with its tasteful colour schemes. It's a little bit camp with some sparkly glitter costumes and attendants that for no discernible reason look like ninjas with umbrellas. There are a few touches of humour in the rather old-style special effects although they do render the monster Python a lot less menacing than he sounds in the synopsis. It suits Vivaldi's music though and the performance, picking up on the Four Seasons theme, is elegant rather than edgy and driven.
In terms of development of the plot Dorilla in Tempe is a lot easier to follow than most opera seria and not overly populated with characters with similar sounding names. You only have to work out who are boys playing girls and girls playing castrati roles, and females playing shepherd boys who are really gods, since Apollo is up to his usual tricks here disguised as the shepherd Nomio hoping to make another conquest. He's his sights set on Dorilla, daughter of Admeto, intending to take her away from her lover Elmiro. Dorilla's sister Eudamia doesn't help as she also has an eye for Elmiro, rejecting the devoted Filindo. Forced to intervene to save Dorilla from being sacrificed to appease Python, we see a better side of Apollo's nature here however, showing mercy and sorting out everyone's troubles at the conclusion. A deus ex machina ending indeed.
There's no attempt in this production to find any real world connection or contemporary updating, but rather it just tries to get the work across in the best way possible. It's not greatly imaginative but it works and is entertaining enough, certainly not the chore that baroque opera played straight can sometimes be. Vivaldi's music certainly makes it much more exciting, and anything that sounds more conventional is in the pasticcio additions from J.A. Hasse and Leonardo Leo, two other nonetheless neglected baroque composers worthy of rediscovery should Wexford decide to extend further in this direction. And with this kind of production there's no reason why not. It comes across very well in the Wexford National Opera House theatre, certainly attracted the audience to a sell-out run and the production held interest in the drama throughout what could otherwise have been a tiring three hours.
Although it kept a keen visual stimulus with an impressive set and occasional devices and humorous touches, the credit for engaging interest can probably be put down more to the excellent singing performances. Establishing distinctive costumes and looks for each of the characters certainly helped, but each performer (the majority apparently coming across from the Venice production) also made their own clear impression with skillful singing. The embattled figures inevitably fare best, not just Manuela Custer's serenely resigned Dorilla but also fiery performances from Rosa Bove as Filindo and José Maria Lo Monaco as Elmiro. Mezzo-soprano Laura Margaret Smith swanned around menacingly as Eudamia, Veronique Valdés was suitable godlike as Nomio/Apollo and Marco Bussi's rather camp Admeto nonetheless had bite when it came to discharging his sentencing over the disobedient lovers.
Links: Wexford Festival Opera, RTE Livestream
