The crack early-music ensemble Magnificat attempted the difficult challenge of performing a Baroque comic opera in concert over the weekend. The form is unlike serious opera or slighter genres such as intermezzos or serenatas, which readily lend themselves to unstaged presentation. Comic opera, with its typically recitative-heavy, slighter music, depends on stage action, comic timing, and the conveyance of complicated and farcical plots, much of which gets lost by singers in dress clothes standing in place.
I am happy to report that Magnificat, under Warren Stewart’s direction, pulled off the challenge magnificently on Saturday in Berkeley’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.
The evening’s dusted-off museum piece was Alessandro Stradella’s penultimate stage work, Il Trespolo Tutore, a charming work from 1679, for which modern performing material was prepared by Michael Burden for performance at New College, Oxford, in 2004, with translations of the recitatives by Simon Dees and of the arias by Dorothy Manly.
The entire era of 17th-century opera is perhaps the largest unexplored territory in both modern performance and modern musicology. Unlike in later time periods, the delineation between aria and recitative was much less strict — “aria” was truer to its original meaning of “song” than were the extravagant da capo productions of, say, Handel. The recitatives tended to be more tuneful, yet they were built on functional harmony much more than the borderline-repertory works we hear now and then from Monteverdi and Cavalli.
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