Blah blah, another opera based on Orlan--HA! THIS ONE IS BASED ON TASSO'S GERUSALEMME LIBERATA! JOKE'S ON YOU! Hmm. That was probably too much capitalization. But anyway. It's still the same character, more or less. So if Rinaldo got short-changed by Ariodante, never fear; he still gets his own Handel opera.
So Gottfredo is laying siege to Jerusalem with his brother Eustazio and of course Rinaldo, who is also in love with Almirena (a new character, I believe). The leader of the Saracen forces is Agrante, who conspires with his consort Armida to seduce Rinaldo away from the good-guy team, though things get complicated when she falls in love with Rinaldo and he with Almirena. Anyway, the Christians win and the Saracens convert and are forgiven, which is defintely a far cry from Tasso's puritanical source material.
So here's the thing: in the eighteen hundreds, many of the roles were castrati, and further, Handel was constantly reworking his operas and changing around parts to suit particular singers or fashions of the time. What this means is it's kind of impossible to come up with a "definitive" version of the opera. You've gotta just give it your best shot. This production goes in very heavily on the countertenors, and I could not be more pleased about that. According to this article from 2001, it wasn't really until the 1960s that countertenor was taken seriously as a voice type, and I'm glad it was. When I first saw Giulio Cesare, I found the visual of these big burly dudes with these super-high voices a bit incongruous, but at this point, I can honestly say: I'm completely used to it. I don't bat an eye anymore, and indeed it may well be my favorite vocal type. I can understand why those old Italians were so crazy for high voices, and even though I know it's a sin, I'm desperately curious as to what the superstar castrati of the time sounded like.
Anyway, here we get four of them, which I think is more than I've ever seen in one production: Rinaldo himself (David Daniels), Gottfredo (David Walker), Eustazio (Axel Köhler), and a small dual-role as "a herald" and "a Christian magician" (Charles Maxwell). In fact, Agrante is the only non-countertenor male in the opera, and while Egils Sinins is fine, as far as it goes, he's also to be the least interesting singer here. All of the countertenors are great, with my favorite being--somewhat arbitrarily, probably-- Köhler, who really brings it. Then again, there's also everyone's favorite (ALLEGED!) sex offender, David Daniels, who, tragically, is also one hell of a singer. Obviously, Plácido Domingo is getting more press, but let's face it, he was near the end of his career anyway; Daniels is definitely more of a blow to me (if you google him these days, the first thing you'll see is a really seedy-looking mugshot). Still, for what it's worth, I found I was entirely able to dissociate his performance from his sins, and it remains really great. I realize I've given the women short shrift here, so let me briefly note that Noëmi Nadelmann tears it up as Armida, and Deborah York--in an admittedly less interesting role--is fine as Almirena. And the music is the usual Handel magic.
So that's all good. As for the production itself...well, I kind of sneer at people who are all "OH THIS PRODUCTION OF MACBETH HAS GUNS IN IT IT'S TERRIBLE." That level of purism just seems tedious and dumb to me. However, I wouldn't exactly blame anyone who wasn't feeling this, which veers hard into out-and-out surrealism, featuring truly bizarre sets and a giant doll on wheels for no reason and so much other nonsense I hardly know how to describe it. Still, that's other people. I got used to it quickly enough and found it perfectly fun, even if I couldn't tell you what if anything the director was trying to get at. There are other versions available (including thistotally fascinating-looking version of a weird, eighteenth-century bootleg version of the opera), but this one--which I believe I got just because it was an ex-library version going dirt-cheap--is perfectly acceptable to my eye.
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