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Reviewer: Lindsay Kemp
The booklet-note for this release asks a total of three times the question ‘is Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima e di corpo an opera or an oratorio?’ Certainly it can be interpreted either way. First performed in Rome in 1600, its elevating subject – allegorical figures debating the benefits of the kind of disciplined living that will guarantee heavenly afterlife (championed by Anima, the Soul) over submission to brief earthly pleasures and eternal hell (longed for by Corpo, the Body) – puts it squarely at the head of the oratorio tradition. Yet at the same time it is the work of a composer who had toiled in the very workshop of the musico-dramatic avant-garde in Florence, and who here was among the very first to render dialogue in the radical solo recitar cantando of early opera. If René Jacobs has any doubts over the answer, he does not allow it to stay his hand; his reading, derived from a staging at Berlin’s Staatsoper im Schiller-Theater, absolutely reeks of the stage.
Rappresentatione is not, it should be said, an opera with the declamatory flexibility, narrative grip or dramatic depth of Monteverdi’s Orfeo of seven years later – it is far more static and undifferentiated than that – but it does have a similar flavour with its solos, choruses and ritornellos, many of them in decidedly dance-like measure. Jacobs strengthens the resemblance by employing the same kind of luxury scoring (the original publication’s recommendations were relaxed on the subject), and the colourings of violins, viols, strings, recorders, cornetts, trombones and percussion added to the expected continuo battery are used to give shape and help delineate character. Another of Cavalieri’s suggestions – separating the forces into three groups, each in its own aural space – is also strikingly observed.
As often with Jacobs, it is hard to know how much he has added to the original (though there are definitely some instrumental interventions by Schein), but perhaps that is beside the point. This is a conductor whose deep knowledge of his subject combines with strong dramatic instinct to make a vital theatre piece. Others are free to do it differently, as for example Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata do in their 2004 Alpha recording, a version which for all its predictable beauty sounds subdued next to this production with its firmly characterised singing and lusty playing. Rappresentatione may not be a masterpiece of opera but surely no performance has ever worked harder on its behalf than this one. |
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