Mark your calendars for February 25 at 2 pm to witness a production you may not be able to see in person but ought to at least see via its livestream!
Early baroque opera, with its intimate sound and intricate melodic twists, is not as broadly accessible to listeners as later works that quickly impress us with sweeping melodies and grand orchestrations. When handled with the same tenderness, playfulness and sophistication that its scores and libretti offer, it can be a thrilling and engaging experience, passing its inner glow onto the audience. Juilliard’s production of Erismena, written by the 17th Century Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli, conducted by Avi Stein and staged by director Lisenka Heijboer Castañón, achieves this effect with impressive ease.
Set in antiquity, the plot involves countless twists and turns around war, rivalry, love, jealousy, regret, as well as lost, mistaken and switched identities, is performed with gusto by an impressive cast of nine young singers. Juilliard landed a coup by calling upon mask maker Julian Crouch to create the set (smartly crafted solely out of brown paper, including the backdrop of scrolling curtains that becomes a perfect canvas for Mary Ellen Stebbins’s dramatic lighting). He also devised the ornate, vaguely periodic costumes (with, to great effect, rather sturdy modern footwear) that handsomely underscore each character’s trait. Most impressively, he delivered a deconstructed puppet that stands in for the pivotal role of King Erimante, ingeniously handled, sung and enacted by the entire cast, taking a life of its own and fittingly creating the effect of an almighty, hovering Überpower.
The libretto calls for numerous, rather swift shifts between serious drama and light comedic interludes, but these contrasts could easily be muddled and lost on the audience, were it not for the director’s attention to detail and an understanding of how to highlight the opera’s inherent, very Venetian blend of lush gravitas and frivolous humor. It certainly helps that the opera is sung in old English, written in 1650 for a London production, making it easier for Juilliard’s performers to really dig into the lyrics – and for the audience to follow along. But I know from my experience as a performance coach that young singers often need a guiding hand, encouragement and plenty of license to let loose and really engage with intent and precision, not just with the text but also context and subtext. Miss Heijboer Castañón clearly gave her singers all of that, enabling them to display the gamut of human emotions with elan, exuberance, tenderness, and many an erotic spark. Highlights included Mezzo Soprano Tivoli Treloar in the title role (disguised in male soldier garb and using her golden voice to aptly convey her character’s distress about her lover’s betrayal, her condemnation to death, and her attempts to hide her proper identity, culminating with a furious reveal in battle); sopranos Song Hee Lee and Gemma Nha, who brought a hefty dose of sensuality and spunk to their interpretations of Aldimira and Flerida, two hedonistic women who are fully aware of the power of their sex (and using it gleefully); and Baritone Trevor Haumschilt-Rocha, whose full beard and burly physique, clad in a baroque dress with pannier, lent itself surprisingly well to the character of Alcesta, an older women who bemoans her old age that makes her no longer desirable (which does not prevent her from making a hilarious pass at a soldier), and displays, besides a hunger for gossip, a warm heart (and countless folds of undergarments). These are but a few examples in a sparkling production that proves that opera is never just one thing. Across the street, at the Met, one can, on a lucky night, witness grand opera that can move mountains, as was the case late last year with a reprise of Otto Schenk’s historic production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, with a stellar cast including the luminous soprano Elza Van Den Heever and one of the greatest if not the greatest German Baritone of our time, Christian Gerhaher, in his long-awaited Met debut, led by Yannick Nezet-Séguin. But here at Juilliard, you can see the stars of the future in the making, and experience the magic of a Venetian Gesamtkunstwerk on an intimate scale, with the singers a mere feet away from you, just as vulnerable, expressive, generous and devoted to this art form as their elders.
While this in-house production, presented in Juilliard’s Meredith Willson Theater is unfortunately not generally accessible to the public, it will be streamed live on February 25 at 2PM:
https://www.juilliard.edu/event/168576/juilliard-opera-presents-francesco-cavallis-erismena