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| Appréciation d'ensemble / Overall evaluation : | ||||
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Reviewer: Berta Joncus
This production is a delight
throughout. For Handel’s greatest Italian cantatas, Emmanuelle Haïm brings
together two stars: soprano Sabine Devieilhe, known above all for her
leadership of opera in France, and the prize-winning young mezzo Léa
Desandre. Haïm retains control by preparing both the scores and the
sopranos’ ornaments, her vision giving this carefully wrought performance a
fiery intensity, as if recorded live in concert.
Vocally the casting is perfect. In
Armida abbandonata, Devieilhe broods over Rinaldo’s escape from her sensual
clutches, darkening her sunny vocal colours and channelling her anger into
eye-popping top notes; Haïm pushes her pauses to the limit when soprano and band
delay re-entering after silences. Desandre, a superb actress, delivers bold
musical rhetoric. Her solo
cantata, La Lucrezia, is a monologue
by the eponymous classical
noblewoman who, having been raped, vainly cries for justice and then kills
herself. Whether limning her chest register with bitterness or angrily spitting
out recitative, Desandre makes Lucrezia’s words burst with meaning, while the
instrumentalists catch her inner turmoil in solos and continuo realisations. All
the musicians weaponise downbeats in this cantata, bringing to them a violence
redolent of what Lucrezia has suffered. Conversely, sweeter lyricism can’t be
found than in Aminta e Fillide, an Arcadian shepherd-finally-gets-shepherdess
story that unites the two singers. As the shepherd Aminta, Devieilhe’s intensity
makes his ardour inescapable, even as Fillide (Desandre) careens capriciously
around her melodic line. You might think you know these cantatas, but this is a
performance to make you think again. | ||||
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