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The opera contains one of the most peculiar, and effective, love duets in the whole genre: when Francesca and Paolo meet — she is tricked into thinking Paolo is his brother Gianciotto, whom it is arranged that she marry — they are speechless, and there is a long orchestral passage that depicts the growth of their instant passion in a most touching way, until the curtain comes down on Act I. That is far more effective than their vocal effusions, though they, too, contain lovely things; but after Act I, Francesca does tend to overheat and to stay that way, so that by the time we reach the cataclysmic Act IV the idiom of ecstasy, frustration and fury has become merely exhausting.
In this Met performance Eva-Maria Westbroek was on better form than she has been for some time, singing with full-throated intensity, which never became harsh or unfocused. Marcello Giordani was adequate, but no more, belonging to that seemingly endless supply of efficient and indistinguishable Italianate tenors that the Met possesses. The brutal but not wholly unsympathetic Gianciotto of Mark Delavan was excellent, and so was his villainous monocular brother, played by Robert Brubaker. Marco Armiliato conducted con slancio.
As part of the London Handel Festival there was a single concert performance in St George’s Hanover Square of one of Telemann’s few operas to have survived, Orpheus, composed in 1726 and rediscovered in the 1970s. The most immediately striking thing about it is that, though it is mainly in German, there are quite a few passages in Italian and in French, the former, according to the notes, romantic and vengeful, the latter pastoral and Bacchanalian. This version of the story has Eurydice’s death engineered by Queen Orasia, who is in love with Orpheus. But when he emerges from Hades he spurns her, so Orasia sets the followers of Bacchus on to him, but when they kill him Orasia feels only torment, and pours out her woes in French, but expires in German. There is a semi-comic subplot involving a friend of Orpheus and one of Orasia’s nymphs.
I have always had a prejudice against Telemann, largely because of the flabbergasting size of his output, larger than that of any of his contemporaries. However, Orpheus turned out to be worth hearing, and I wish the days weren’t over when record companies issued highlights of operas without feeling the scholarly duty to set down every last note, and all variants if there are any. Orpheus has stretches that sound as if they were composed by an 18th-century computer, and then others that are original and lovely — an aria for Orpheus, for instance, significantly in Italian, in which he does the standard berating of Fate, but with only a pizzicato string accompaniment, which would do credit to any composer of the baroque.
I can hardly imagine this work being staged, though, since it is so static. The performers grimaced, scowled and winsomely grinned, and that was enough. What was disappointing was the failure to articulate clearly. They, and especially the Orasia of Eleanor Dennis, seemed to wish that the whole thing was in Italian, which is understandable, but the only way to sing German is to make the most of the consonants, and not, Domingo-like, to more or less banish them. That apart, Dennis’s singing was tremendous, and so was the Orpheus of Jonathan McGovern. Ian Page conducted the Chorus and Orchestra of Classical Opera with evident affection, and showed that Orpheus, and perhaps another Telemann opera or two, deserves to be revived alongside some of Handel’s less than superb pieces.
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