Buxton Opera Festival: Vivaldi L’Olimpiade – not a medal winner for Team Buxton

Antonio Vivaldi: L’Olimpiade

 

Clistene Stephen Gadd  Aristea Rachael Lloyd  Argene Sally Bruce-Payne

Megacle Louise Poole  Licida Marie Elliott  Aminta Mhairi Lawson

Alcandro Jonathan Gunthorpe  Director Richard Williams  Costume designer Olivia Wells

Musical directors
Adrian Chandler & James Johnstone

 

For many of my generation Anton Vivaldi means the Four Seasons and the Gloria. and for many who have been held on a switchboard waiting to speak to an imaginary operator the Spring movement from the Four Seasons may have lost its early promise.

Most of Vivaldi’s opera wasn’t discovered until the later 1920s and even then it remained largely unperformed for another fifty years. Vivaldi, the genius of venetian music belongs to that family of late baroque early classical composers – that would include both Scarlatti father & son, Pergolesi, Telemann – whose works have gradually and deservedly rediscovered in my lifetime.

And the Vivaldi opera though relentlessly in the form of Opera Seria – that is a form divided musically into recitative that carries the action and aria that displays character – has much marvellous music to recommend it to the modern audience. L’Olimpiade however turned out to be of Vivaldi’s more pedestrian devising – not a little because of the a libretto.

I will not bother to sketch out the plot. I fear it would only serve to confuse where such an exercise would normally clarify. Indeed all the plots of all the  G&S operetta together  would compose fewer  coincidences of birth and accidents of disguise and misunderstandings. And the librettist was defeated by the task of bringing synthesis to the improbable. the librettists failures left Vivaldi with an almost impossible musical task of musically trying to differentiate between the many characters on the over-crowded stage. Vivaldi didn’t succeed. The music is at best workmanlike.

Where the composer failed the Director dared… he chose to assist the audience distinguish the characters by bestowing on each was given a prop. One chain smoked; another had a riding crop; another a bowler hat that made him look like Benny Hill; and on…and to which the singers clung like drowning men hold to the wreckage of a ship. The outcome was what little chance there was for the music to supply what the plot and librettist couldn’t was over whelmed.

In the Opera Seria the arias themselves usually sung ‘da capo’ (literally from the top) – the repetition providing the singer to decorate the melody with vocal trills and runs that showed-off their voice. the downside in performance is that it makes for a rather static dramaturgy for modern theatrical tastes.

Modern productions have therefore tended to give the singer complementary business to make the arias more part of continuous action rather than a commentary upon it. And there’s nothing wrong with that but as ever with fashions in theatre you can have too much of a good thing.

L’Olimpiade might have at least provided a set to beguile but once again we had a flat affair…three tables covered in white table cloths set with chairs where characters sat uselessly when they weren’t singing. It wasn’t a great idea and it didn’t work. The stage was cluttered and on a small space like Buxton that really was a waste of space.

The singing itself was workmanlike and altogether this was one L’Olimpiade where there were no winners and medals.

 

 

 

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