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Appréciation d'ensemble / Overall evaluation :
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Reviewer: Berta
Joncus
Too bad this is our only recording
of Francesco Cavalli’s L’ipermestra. Made live at the 2006 Utrecht Early Music
Festival, the performance was super-charged dramatically, gorgeously sung by
several of its principals, and strikingly led by music director Mike Fentross.
But these positives are lost in transmission.
Cavalli advanced operatic forms
pioneered by his teacher Monteverdi. Out of arioso writing, he fashioned
brooding monologues; out of two-party dialogue, he crafted terse,
instrumentally-driven exchanges. His score for L’ipermestra combines these
innovations to probe its messed-up characters. Action circles around the trials
of its title heroine: she saves her husband, whom her father demands that she
murder; after escaping, the husband believes lies that Ipermestra is unfaithful,
and destroys her city of Argos in revenge. Only intervention by Venus stops
further tragedy. Elena Monti is an incandescent Ipermestra, calibrating her powerful instrument to Baroque forces, and in vocal exchanges blowing away her opponents. Bass-baritone Sergio Foresti brings out the bullying manner of Ipermestra’s father with vocal swells, petulant staccatos, and distasteful elaborations. Fentross, who prepared the performance score, propels, halts, hushes and excites his musicians to exploit every note. The instruments he assigns to parts – growling sackbuts for the father, plaintive harp and recorders for Ipermestra – deepen each soloist’s characterisation.
The cast is,
however, uneven, and other male leads tend to over sing. A poor production –
with bad microphone placement, poor (if any) engineering, and no English
translation for a roughly three-hour opera – leaves everyone poorly served.
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