Baroque chamber opera gets its due
Among the many components that make up the Boston Early Music Festival, none is more highly prized than its productions of Baroque opera presented during the festival's biennial summer exhibition. They are entertainments in the fully Baroque sense of the word, usually calling not only for singing and music but for dance and elaborately constructed sets. Most also require a lot of detective work into original editions and performance practice.
The next of these is "Antiochus and Stratonica" by Christoph Graupner, slated for the summer of 2009. But for those who can't wait, BEMF is instituting a new series of Baroque chamber operas, presented annually in semi-staged productions. Tomorrow night's inaugural offering, at Jordan Hall, pairs two relatively obscure one-act works: John Blow's "Venus and Adonis" and Marc-Antoine Charpentier's "Actéon."
Paul O'Dette, one of BEMF's two co-directors, says that in the research on Baroque opera that he and others have done, "we were continually impressed by the enormous variety that exists. Everything from tiny little chamber operas with a handful of singers and a few instruments to court spectacles with a large orchestra and a stage full of singers and dancers." Understandably, he and his colleagues gravitated toward the more elaborate offerings, which he calls "spectacle operas."
"And we thought, the problem with this is that it is so expensive and so complex to produce, we can really only do these big operas every couple of years," he continues. "But it's a shame not to have any presence in Boston during the off-festival years, and it's also a shame that we never get to explore smaller-scale works, many of which are of very high quality and are infrequently performed."
"Venus and Adonis," written in the early 1680s, is commonly reckoned as the earliest surviving English opera, and it was high on O'Dette's list. It compares favorably with the best works of Purcell, he says, though it's harder to bring off successfully.
The story, drawn from Ovid's "Metamorphosis," has Venus falling in love with Adonis and urging him to hunt a wild boar that ends up killing Adonis. The BEMF team wondered if they could come up with another opera on a hunting theme, so as to have some thematic coherence. Gilbert Blin, the stage director, suggested "Actéon," written around the same time and also drawn from Ovid. The title character, on a hunt, happens upon the goddess Diana while she's bathing; Diana turns him into a deer, and he is devoured by his own hounds.
The works, O'Dette says, are masterpieces, despite their low visibility: "I would submit that these are two of the great chamber operas of the 17th century."
Each work will be presented with a small ensemble comprising string quartet, two oboes, bassoon, and a three-instrument continuo group.
Despite the impulse to scale down, both works incorporate dance, and the singers will perform in costume and act out their parts on stage. Only the sets are missing, O'Dette points out, though he mysteriously hints that Jordan Hall will be "enhanced" somewhat.
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