The Palau de les Arts premieres an outstanding production of the play, half vaudeville, half melodrama, by Handel.
The Valencian Palau de les Arts continues its season brilliantly with the presentation of the drama for music of Georg Friedrich Hündel in a outstanding co-production between the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Dutch National Opera, the Canadian Opera Company and the Chicago Opera.
The work belongs to the pieces by the composer that we might describe as hbridas. From a current dramaturgical perspective, it would be a mix between the sitcom or vaudeville, and the romantic melodrama with a happy ending, with some touch of posthumous moralitybecause in the end, when the inevitable villain has been discarded following a due duel, the mistake resolved and the lovers reconciled, there is a grouping of the characters, all good, to rejoice that love has triumphed and fidelity, which is often called by the Italian word “costanza“, is restored with the added optimism that all the happy virtues will endure.
Richard Jones has set the medieval kingdom of Scotland in a pension where the schematic plot unfolds, to unfold the music that, as required by the style known as baroque, deals with analyzing what each one thinks, feels, suspects or fearsin a richness of invention that prolongs the arias, duets and triplets, with time for a skilful theater director like Jones to take advantage of to enrich the action that tends to statism with powerful images, both in the movement and relationship between the figures and in a subtle and very intentional play of lights.
In this way, a very solid stage artifact is achieved so that the performers can undertake their double task of singing and acting, which the large cast fulfills with excellence, led by the magnificent mezzo Ekaterina Vorontsava, splendidly seconded by all the others. The Orquesta de la Comunitat Valenciana has not diminished its excellent quality, and Andrea Marcon’s baton unravels the music paying attention to a sonority that sensibly disregards any historicist itch, with what can be catacombic, demonstrating that this beautiful storypremiered at London’s Covent Garden on January 8, 1975, remains impressive in its beauty and its ability to arouse the most varied emotions in an audience that appreciated the four hours of baroque feast as an exquisite prelude that anticipates the imminent Fallas.
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