Well, Tamerlano's the Timurid emperor. He's captured the Ottoman emperor, Bajazet, and also his daughter, Asteria. There's also some sort of Greek guy, Andronico, whose status is extremely unclear hanging around. Andronico and Asteria are in love, but Tamerlano wants to marry her even though he's already engaged, the cad. A certain amount of angst ensues, there are murder plots, things aren't quite clear about who's in love with whom, Bajazet ends up committing suicide, but Tamerlano repents and everyone else is happy. The end.
When I was writing about Orlando, I remarked that I feel like I have a tendency to lose critical distance with Handel operas, and to automatically declare the most recent one I've seen as my favorite. Well, it is with mixed feelings that I must declare that we now see that this isn't necessarily the case. "Mixed" because on the one hand I'm glad to see tangible evidence that I do in fact have critical faculties, and on the other I'm sad because I didn't like this one very much, for both story and, more importantly, musical reasons. First: the story is really pointlessly convoluted, and just not that interesting (the subtitles for whatever reason suffer from consistent bizarrely tortured syntax--you don't want to have to take time to parse their meaning, but you do--but I don't think that's really the main problem). This could be partially the production I suppose, but I kind of doubt it. The motives for Bajazet's suicide are kind of murky and don't have the emotional impact that you'd hope for, especially given how rare it is to see a good guy die in a Handel opera (is this the first I've seen? Well...do you count Semele as an opera, and do you count the title character as a "good guy"?). Also, while it's common to see bad guys reform in Handel operas--which is something I approve of!--I must say that the title character here is an unbelievable prick throughout, and his abrupt turn is neither believable nor satisfying. Bah.
Of course, if the music were good, all of this would be of relative unimportance, but, well...it's kind of weird how unengaging it it, given how good we know Handel was. There's a distressingly high recitative-to-aria ratio--and, as noted above, not in the service of a particularly engaging story! SO OFTEN it feels like a character is going to break into song and then just...doesn't, or does so so briefly that you barely notice. It genuinely feels like Handel wasn't really trying here. Of course it has its moments, but they're much fewer and further between than they ought to be. It was written in the same year as Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda,but it seems like a disservice to compare it to either of those.
This production is...fine. They got Plácido Domingo as Bajazet, which of course they really play up, even though he's only the fourth-most-significant character. He's fine, but honestly, nothing that special. Probably more than anything because neither is the character. It's a fairly sparse, abstract production that I basically like. There's a giant blue elephant at one point, so what the hey. I don't know; I could be wrong. Maybe if I saw another version everything would snap into focus and the opera would take its place among my favorites. But for now, I remain underwhelmed. Even Homer nods.
No comments:
Post a Comment