Ah, so finally the time has come to acknowledge the fact: wow are female composers ever marginalized. You can criticize my reading habits for not including more women, but you really can'tcriticize me for never 'til now having seen an opera by a woman, because...they just aren't shown. It's not that they don't exist--here are five hundred of them, albeit some lost or extant only in fragments--but good luck finding the chance to actually watch one, with very rare exceptions. I can't help but think that this really does present a good case for affirmative action: sure, you can say "if they're good, they'll be put on," but that plainly isn't true for all kinds of structural reasons. I mean, I'm sure some of them aren't good, as isn't some of everything, but you don't know! Statistically, it would be very surprising if there weren't some real gems out there, but someone has to make an effort to find them. If you ask me, it would not be unreasonable to stipulate that at least one of the Met's Live in HD productions per season be an opera by a woman--and just commissioning new operas, either; it's fine if you want to do that too, but the point is to see what already-existing female-penned operas there are out there, sort of a secret history of the form. Yes, I'm sure it would be challenging to dig through all the material out there and find the relevant scores and evaluate them for quality, but it would definitely be worth it.
Anyway, this is the first known opera written by a woman. Appropriately, it's based on events from Orlando Furioso. What a shock. Opera McGill put it on, and helpfully uploaded it here. And it's perfectly credible. Nothing surprising, but fun. Alcina's bewitched Ruggiero and spirited him off to her island love-nest, but he's left his fiancée and slay some saracens, dammit! Or possibly slay Christians. Ruggiero converts from one side to the other at some point, and I'm not clear where he is now. It's all about the same! But anyway. The good sorceress Melissa comes by to save him from this nightmare in which he finds himself and that is that.
It sounds very Monteverdi-ish, which is fine. The McGill people do good work; they've moved it from an island to some sort of haunted mansion, which actually makes a certain amount of sense due to the presence of enchanted portraits with people trapped in them, but there IS a lot that specifically refers to the island; the prelude with Neptune and his pals is made a bit nonsensical by the change. The cast is fine, though, I thought, probably not quite as good as in Ariodante. I don't know; at an hour and a quarter, this is substantially shorter than that one, so maybe they let their b-grade students appear here. I'm not really criticizing; the singing is perfectly good. Some of the acting is slightly dubious: in particular, you kind of want to laugh at the part where both Alcina and Melissa are urging Ruggiero to go with them and he's sort of swaying back and forth in a very school-play-looking display of indecision. As noted, the opera is short, so this production includes an interstitial bit by another female baroque composer, Barbara Strozzi. The music is fine, and I approve of highlighting another female composer, but it does dull the opera's momentum somewhat, I felt.
Never mind; I'm glad to have had the chance to see this. Opera McGill is cool.
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