Sara Couden and Nina Jones in Antonia Bembo’s
Ercole amante (Photo: Valentina Sadiul)
Between The Monkey King and Gautier Capuçon's cello recital, I saw Ars Minerva's world premiere staging of Antonia Bembo's 1707 opera, Ercole amante. I'd previous written a preview for the Chronicle and SFCV, and Ars Minerva has a strong track record with its revivals of forgotten works, so I was particularly looking forward to it.
Well, you win some and you lose some, and this was, alas, not quite there. To start with, in the first act, the orchestra sounded ragged and underrehearsed. (Things were tighter and livelier in the second act.) To continue, the opera, which was heavily cut, wasn't as good as I'd thought it would be, based on my interviews with company founder Céline Ricci and music director Matthew Dirst. There were fewer arias and more recitative than I'd expected, and the latter got rather tedious in the first act.
I should have listened to the (also heavily cut) recording made from the 2023 concert performances by Il Gusto Barrocco, to try to get some sense of what the opera is like; possibly they made different cuts from Ars Minerva's, since the latter company made some cuts based on what they could reasonably stage.
Lastly, there was an unfortunate vocal hole at the center of the opera: Zachary Gordin, Ercole, who sang the entire opera bare chested and bare legged, dressed in sandals and a gold skirt, has very impressive musculature, but a somewhat less impressive voice. He looked great and was fine dramatically, but the opera would have worked better with a more commanding baritone in the title role.
The other singers were good to excellent (Aura Veruni and Melissa Sondhi as dueling goddesses; Kindra Scharich as Ercole's long-suffering wife, Deianira; tenor Max Ary as Ercole's son Hyllo sounded uncomfortable at the very top of his range but was otherwise fine; Lila Khazoum as Hyllo's fiancée; Sara Couden as a page; Nina Jones as Deianira's servant; Nick Volkert in several roles). Ricci's staging was funny and did everything it needed to with a tiny number of props. I loved Entropy's projections, which were based on Baroque stage design and various paintings.
- Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
- Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
- Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
- Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
- Lisa Hirsch, preview, SFCV and S.F. Chronicle
No comments:
Post a Comment