Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi.” Mozart’s “La Finta Giardiniera.” Berlioz’s “Béatrice et Bénédict.” Rossini’s “Otello.” Verdi’s “I Due Foscari” and “Giovanna d’Arco,” not to mention his “Don Carlos” and “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” in their original French versions. Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre.” Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten.” Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten.” Meredith Monk’s “Atlas.”
We all have our lists of great works that, for one reason or another, haven’t been performed — yet — by the mighty Metropolitan Opera. Perhaps first on mine is Handel’s magnificent “Alcina,” an extended excerpt from which will be screened on Wednesday as part of Lincoln Center’s annual Great Voices on Film series.
Few operas have an emotional range that stretches as wide as this one’s. An unsparing, funny, poignant anatomy of love, “Alcina” takes place on the magic island inhabited by its title character, a sorceress who seduces men and then transforms them into the rocks, trees and animals that dot her lair.
She has taken captive a knight named Ruggiero (originally written for the great castrato Giovanni Carestini and now usually sung by a mezzo-soprano), and the opera begins with the arrival on the island of Bradamante, Ruggiero’s fiancée, who has come to rescue him. Bradamante is disguised as her brother, Ricciardo, attracting the attentions of Alcina’s lovesick sister, Morgana.
The plot has its convolutions. There’s Oronte, Alcina’s general, who’s in love with Morgana, and there’s Oberto, a boy searching for his father, who’s been transformed by Alcina. Bradamante’s guardian, Melisso, who lands on the island with her, appears to Ruggiero at one point pretending to be his old tutor, Atlante.
Deceptions and disguises crowd the opera, the theme of which is the imaginative lengths to which we’ll go for love. It is only at the end, once Alcina’s magic has abandoned her and she flees with Morgana, that illusions are dispelled and the island’s transformed men return to human form. But as in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” even a peaceful resolution is tinged with the bitter memories of what came before it.
The libretto, based on Ariosto’s epic poem “Orlando Furioso,” drew from Handel one of his finest scores, energetic and yet with daringly extended passages of serenity and melancholy. Bradamante is given heroic coloratura; Morgana sometimes pines and sometimes bubbles; Ruggiero’s slow arias are exquisite. Act II ends with a wrenching series of minor-key arias for Alcina — “Ah! mio cor,” “Ombre pallide” and “Mi restano le lagrime” — as she confronts the loss of her powers.
New York audiences have been lucky enough to spend an unusually large amount of time with “Alcina” this season. In September, a group of young singers led by the director R. B. Schlather staged the opera in the intimate gallery space of the Whitebox Art Center on the Lower East Side. It was an experiment in openness: The production’s two weeks of rehearsals were free to the public, and the performances were streamed live on the Internet as well as broadcast on a television in the gallery’s front window.
But the live experience in the hot, crowded gallery was distinctive. The concentrated rehearsal process had drawn out of the talented singers performances of fearsome focus and nerve. The set was abstract and spare — the space’s white box was decorated with little more than a smudge of lipstick on one wall and a snarling boar’s head mounted on another — but it contained within it enough ingenious holes and passages to conjure some of the necessary magical atmosphere.
A month later, the mezzo Joyce DiDonato sang Alcina in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall, the latest in a series of Handel operas at the hall featuring the English Concert, led by Harry Bicket. This version of the score was even more complete than the one at Whitebox, and the singers far more experienced, with Ms. DiDonato in particularly fine, fiery form. Rather than being “Alcina” overkill, seeing the opera multiple times in quick succession whetted my appetite for more.
The production being screened at the Walter Reade Theater by Lincoln Center was directed by Adrian Noble at the Vienna State Opera in 2010. The basic visual idea — a bright garden seen through a large opening at the back of the set — is reminiscent of Robert Carsen’s celebrated “Alcina” at the Paris Opera in 1999, an ideal vehicle for Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay and Susan Graham in their primes.
Mr. Noble placed the opera a few decades after Handel composed it, in the Neoclassical-style London home of the seductive Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. The idea is that the opera is being both observed and, occasionally, enacted by a group of 18th-century aristocrats. It’s a clever notion, and allows for both an overall aura of formality and disruptive bursts of emotion, with a second half — Handel’s three acts have been divided into two parts — conceived as a moody nocturne.
The performance may be most intriguing, particularly to American opera lovers, for the soprano Anja Harteros, superb in the title role. A major star in Europe, her voice powerful and flexible and capable of carrying intense feeling, she has made only very limited appearances in this country. Anything she does is worth seeing and hearing, but particularly this Alcina: While in demand for her Verdi and Wagner, Ms. Harteros has not been widely known as a Handelian. But her style is impeccable, her coloratura clear and easy and her negotiation of the character’s fall from grace passionate and moving.
Her co-star as Ruggiero, Vesselina Kasarova, is another singer who appears too rarely in New York. But her work here is inconsistent, her energy marred by turbulent, unsettled tone. Kristina Hammarström brings an earthy yet sensitive voice to Bradamante, and Veronica Cangemi is a bright Morgana.
Besides Ms. Harteros, the production’s main draw is its conductor, Marc Minkowski, an early-music specialist. Because the Vienna Philharmonic, whose members are drawn from the State Opera orchestra, was on tour at the time, Mr. Minkowski was able to bring in the period-instrument group he founded, Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble, one of the finest in the world.
Lincoln Center originally intended to screen Peter Sellars’s version of Handel’s “Theodora,” from the 1996 Glyndebourne Festival, starring Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, on Monday as a companion to “Alcina.” But a recent change in rights made that impossible — it is available on DVD for home viewing — and a production of the work from the 2009 Salzburg Festival in Austria has been substituted.
Directed by Christof Loy, this agonized oratorio about an early Christian martyr is imagined as a kind of installation. The vast stage of the Salzburg Festspielhaus is set as a gloomy church interior and the production unfolds as a kind of rehearsal for a performance of “Theodora.” (Mr. Loy tried a similar tack at Salzburg for Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” in 2011.) Ivor Bolton conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and a strong cast that includes Bernarda Fink as Irene and Christine Schäfer as Theodora.
Unlike last year’s Great Voices on Film presentations, which included some difficult-to-find lieder performances, much of what’s being screened this week, and in two programs of Kurt Weill on April 1, is available on DVD. This makes the series slightly less than essential, but still valuable: When it comes to opera, the bigger the screen and more sophisticated the sound system, the better.
The rarest thing being screened is “September Songs,” Larry Weinstein’s documentary-style film from 1994 that recorded performances of Weill’s work from singers like Teresa Stratas, Elvis Costello and Lou Reed in an abandoned warehouse.
While it was released on video, a copy isn’t easy to come by, and the program on the evening of April 1 will be appropriately rounded out with footage of Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, singing his songs.
An excellent recent production of Weill and Brecht’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” starts things off just before “September Songs,” directed by the Catalan theater group La Fura dels Baus and filmed at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Piles of trash and hordes of dancers and extras fill the stage for an ominously contemporary vision of a hyper-capitalist dystopia, with an impressive cast led by Measha Brueggergosman, Michael König, Jane Henschel and Willard White.
As far as New York performances go, the Manhattan School of Music gave a solid run of this scathing work in 2013, but the Met hasn’t put it on since 1995. (“Mahagonny” was apparently one of the projects Peter Gelb discussed with the Broadway star Kelli O’Hara, who ended up making her debut in Lehar’s “The Merry Widow” on New Year’s Eve.)
It deserves to return to the house, but the Met’s programming priority should really be “Alcina.” Recent, successful productions of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” and “Rodelinda” have debunked the notion that Baroque opera doesn’t work in the vast space, and the scenic possibilities of “Alcina” make it, if anything, an even better fit than those masterpieces.
So let me make this a public plea to Mr. Gelb, and to Ms. DiDonato, the most likely star: Make it happen!
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