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 La Calisto at the Royal Opera House |
A tale of excess given too gaudy a makeover
REVIEW: LA CALISTO
Royal Opera House
DAVID Alden’s production of La Calisto, first seen in Munich in 2005, marks the debut at Covent Garden both of the American director and the opera.
Based on an erotic comedy from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it centres on the fate of Calisto, one of Diana’s chaste nymphs, after Jove seduces her.
Francesco Cavalli and his librettist Giovanni Faustini wrote for 17th-century Venice’s public theatres and carnival crowds.
With no great patron they had to attract audiences on their own merits. This they did with racy dramas, containing risqué situations, bawdy language, cross-dressing and sexual excess, presaging Offenbach three centuries later. Very much in tune with our licentious times!
Alden plays up the extravagant assortment of crazy characters, costumed by Buki Schiff, for all they’re worth: satyrs, gods, nymphs and animals, in leopard-skin business suits, and general fancy dress. No sexual innuendo is left unexplored. Designer Paul Steinberg replaces Cavalli’s woodland setting with a hall garishly decorated with zebra stripes and a tilting, illuminated ceiling.
But fun though it is, Alden’s fidgety, heartless approach rather undermines sympathy for Calisto’s plight or her loss of purity and innocence.
It is a musically splendid evening. The cast of fine early-music exponents sing and act superbly.
Sally Matthews, in the title role, uses her beautiful voice with exquisite refinement and sensuality. Mezzo Monica Bacelli as an elegant Diana; Umberto Chiummo, a Cary Grant look-alike as Jove; Lawrence Zazzo’s rich counter-tenor as the shepherd Endymion, and Véronique Gens as Juno, all sang beautifully.
Equally enjoyable were the teeming cast of supporting comic characters led by tenor Guy de Mey’s nymph, Linfea – a sort of sex-mad Edna Everidge; Dominique Visse’s virtuoso performance as the bizarre goat-satyr Satirino, and Markus Werba’s scheming, metallic-suited Mercury.
Ivor Bolton conducts the Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble and members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with vitality and flair.
He uses a new edition of the score by Álvaro Torrente, taking a spare approach to the sketchy source material rather than the lusher textures favoured by others.
It is curiously at odds with the gaudy excess of the production.
Helen Lawrence
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