Théâtre de l’Archevêché
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| Images: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2025 © Monika Rittershaus |
Calisto – Lauranne Oliva
Giove – Alex Rosen
Diana – Giuseppina Bridelli
Endimione – Paul-Antoine Bénos-Dijan
Giunone, L’Eternità – Anna Bonitatibus
Linfea – Zachary Wilder
La Natura, Pane, Furia – David Portillo
Mercurio – Dominic Sedgwick
Destino, Satirino, Furia – Théo Imart
Silvano, Furia – José Coca Loza
Set designs – Julia Katharina Berndt
Costumes – Hannah Clark
Lighting – Matthew Richardson
Choreography – Dustin Klein
Ensemble Correspondances
Opera’s relationship to broader social and political movements is, like that of all cultural phenomena, complex, though sometimes clearer than in other cases. This holds at least as much for performance as for creation. Chance – the right person or persons at the right time, or indeed the wrong person(s) at the wrong time – can always play a role, albeit usually in combination with other factors. The world of seventeenth-century Venetian opera, of late Monteverdi and his pupil Francesco Cavalli, doubtless held a particular appeal for the Europe (and United States) of the Sixties and Seventies and changing social mores: women’s and gay liberation, repudiation of monogamy, and so on—just as the increasingly popular Così fan tutte did. Yet so did the singular figure of Raymond Leppard. Without him, it is difficult to imagine Cavalli having reached Glyndebourne when he did: first L’Ormindo (1967-8, on the back of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and receiving a subsequent guest visit to Munich in 1969) and then La Calisto (1970, 1971, and 1974, with guest appearances in the UK and continental Europe in the meantime). We should probably have approached Cavalli’s music at some point otherwise, yet this was the path taken. Leppard’s landmark recordings of those two operas, combined with editions and performances of other works, did much to establish them in a public consciousness that itself seemed ready for their decidedly un-Victorian (indeed un-1950s) morality. The final duet of Poppea is a locus classicus of ‘amoral’ conclusion, or rather elevation of ‘love’, desire, whatever you wish to call it, over all else; it was of course almost certainly not composed by Monteverdi and may indeed have been the work of Cavalli. At any rate, it sets the scene nicely for works such as La Calisto, given an intriguing, feminist directorial twist at its close here by Jestke Mijnssen.
If the route has taken inevitable detours, Cavalli may now be heard regularly across the world. The Festival d’Aix-en-Provence gave L’Erismena in 2017, a welcome opportunity, though La Calisto is to my mind the more interesting and involving opera (and here received a considerably superior production and performance). That Glyndebourne Calisto was of course one of Janet Baker’s great triumphs, in the role of Diana. mercifully captured for the rest of us on record with Leppard, the London Philharmonic, and a generally splendid cast. We can hear there an absorbing conception of what Cavalli might sound like and once did, yet we should generally resist nostalgia and concentrate on what we might do today, a task rendered easier by what may well be the finest performance of an opera on period instruments I have experienced in the flesh. It also takes its place in that fraught yet fascinating history of why Cavalli’s works in general and this in particular might hold appeal to audiences at certain times, offering a far more erotic experience than any other I can recall, whilst still inevitably pointing to historical difference. The world of La Calisto is not ours, whether in morality or conceptions of gender, though it probably comes closer than it does to the worlds of La traviata or Tosca.
Consciously or otherwise (it does not really matter), that tension came through in Mijnssen’s staging. Initially I wondered, without especially minding, why it had been updated to a sumptuous eighteenth-century, to a world of a decadent nobility redolent of Les Liaisons dangereuses, yet it became clear that this was intended to invoke – and did – a world of experimentation in sexual attraction as well as luxury and decadence almost for their own sake. Bored, cruel gods become bored, cruel aristocrats, perhaps thereby awaiting their comeuppance. With a set from Julia Katharina Berndt, whose impression of wood panelling conveys foundations of more than a century earlier, more general distance from and roots in that earlier period are readily apparent. Social differentiation is clear in the case of Endimione, a commedia dell’arte singer performing for the pleasure of his divine audience: at their mercy (or not). It seems, however, less clear in the case of Calisto, whose dress suggested equality with the gods. Perhaps that is the point, yet if that were the case, I am not sure why it not so across the board. It is nonetheless clear in her punishment by Giunone, transformed not into a bear, it seems, but a pauper in sackcloth: perhaps the ultimate disgrace, whether in lack of wealth or implied penitence. Hers, it seems, might actually be a Christian presence in a world ruled by depraved paganism.
Otherwise, games, disguises, transformation, and violence extend from beginning to end, especially at the hands of the shepherd Endimione’s sylvan persecutors: bookended by a prophetic funeral, gods in mourning, and a closing scene in which, to our shock and the gods’, Calisto turns on Giove and kills him. The scene frozen, funeral music sounds. Is this the death of Giove in human form – it seems more than that – or a fuller death enabled by his transformation into human form? If the chief of the gods dies – can die – what might the future hold? More awkward are questions of gender transformation. A production cannot be held entirely responsible for audience reaction, of course, and there was a certain element that would probably have found male assumption of female roles, let alone a male god assuming his daughter’s form, intrinsically hilarious, no matter what; I fear some such people might even have felt and reacted similarly to any suggestion of lesbianism. That said, especially in the case of gender fluidity, the production was not entirely innocent of encouragement. That may have roots in the work; it certainly has roots in the story of Cavalli’s Venetian operas. If, though, we could have a feminist twist, a broader gender twist might also have helped. Another plus, though: we had dancing, even when comedic, that listened to and responded to the music rather than merely inflicting itself upon it. Many thanks to choreographer Dustin Klein for that rarer-than-it-should be boon.
Sébastien Daucé led the Ensemble Correspondances with flexibility, a keen sense of dramatic narrative, and an equally fine sense of sensuality: just what was called for—and without a hint of dogmatism. A splendidly varied – always with discernible reason – continuo group proved the foundation on which much else rested, including what may well be the sweetest toned ‘period’ strings I have heard whilst retaining capacity for delicacy, and cornetts that managed both to affect and to hold their tuning in the outdoor theatre of Aix’s archepiscopal palace. I only read this afterwards, but how refreshing to hear an early-music conductor take into account just what needs to be in performance: ‘On that basis – i.e. all these different scenarios that remain open in the score – we will come up with a theoretical line-up, an adaptation of the counterpoint, of the intermediate parts, etc., but without ever touching what already exists.’
That latter point may be thought conservative
by some standards, yet it is far from absurdly so. More important, ‘this
adaptation means that our version will sound less like the one performed in
Venice in 1651 than the one that might have been performed instead 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 idea is to have a five-part score that makes greater use of the instrumentalists and is suitable for an outdoor venue with a capacity of around 1300. When it was premiered, there were an average of 100 people per evening. While we cannot simply apply a coefficient based on the number of spectators, because the acoustics also play a role in how the music is heard [Amen to that!], it is safe to say that there will be at least ten times as many instrumentalists, i.e. an orchestra of 60 musicians. We are not quite there yet, but that is the idea! …until we have tested them at the Archevêché, we won’t know if we have too many or too few of this or that instrument.
It is refreshing not only to read those words, but also and all the more so refreshing, stimulating, and frankly overdue to hear their musical results in a world that still mostly insists on pitifully small forces quite unmatched to performing spaces, let alone to twenty-first-century ears. I hope to hear more from Daucé and his ensemble, who whilst not in any meaningful way sounding ‘like’ Leppard and his, seem more attuned to his and to the work’s creators’ creative, more properly historical anti-puritanism than the greater part of what we have heard over the intervening half-century. 'Inauthentic' yet atmospherically Mediterranean percussion leading us into the interval would surely have surprised Leppard, yet made him smile. Cavalli too, I should like to think.
A good number of the cast will be familiar to those who have seen earlier instalments of seventeenth-century Venetian opera, Monteverdi and Cavalli, in Aix, so much so that one can almost speak of an Aix Venetian ensemble with a mutable core, rather as once one could for Salzburg and Mozart. That experience tells, I think, as does its developmental nature. All singers seemed fully at home in Giovanni Faustini’s libretto, Cavalli’s response, and that of their twenty-first production and musical team too. Lauranne Oliva gave a touching performance of the title role, growing in steel, yet ultimately true to the character’s innocence, well supported as elsewhere by Hannah Clark’s costumes. Alex Rosen’s necessarily multifaceted Giove took in not only counter-tenor assumption of Diana’s form, but increasingly strong hints of something deeper than his fellow deities might have understood. Diana herself benefited from a comprehending, flexible assumption, divine yet what we know as human, from Giuseppina Bridelli, notwithstanding loss of opportunity to act as Giove. Anna Bonitatibus offered an imperious star-turn as Giunone, lifting every scene in which she appeared insofar as that were possible. Dominic Sedgwick’s Mercurio was quite the energising presence, indeed properly mercurial. My pick of the rest would have to include Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian’s truly human, lovelorn Endimione and a strutting, peacock Satirino from his fellow countertenor Théo Imart. This premiere, however, showed that however clichéd the expression may be by now, this was a company performance, very much more than the sum of its appreciable parts from 1651 onwards.
