Other Links
Editorial Board
- UK Editors
- Roger Jones and John Quinn
Editors for The Americas - Bruce Hodges and Jonathan Spencer Jones
European Editors - Bettina Mara and Jens F Laurson
Consulting Editor - Bill Kenny
Assistant Webmaster -Stan Metzger
Founder - Len Mullenger
Google Site Search
SEEN AND HEARD
INTERNATIONAL
OPERA
REVIEW
Purcell, The
Indian Queen
Early Music Guild, Baroque Northwest, Seattle Early Dance,, The Chapel
at the Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 25.2.2011 (BJ)
Direction and choreography: Anna Mansbridge
Musical direction: Kim Pineda
Lighting and set: Theodore Deacon
Costumes: Jamia Hansen-Murray
Cast:
Zempoalla: Rebekah Gilmore, soprano
Adario: Catherine Olson, soprano
Don Alvaro: Aaron Cain, bass-baritone
Damon: Jay White, countertenor
Erika Chang, Spirit 1, soprano
Sibyl Adams, Spirit 2, soprano
With a major festival waiting in the
wings to treat Seattle, in mid-March, to more than two dozen
performances of Handel (for information: www.americanhandelfestival.org),
it was a pleasure to encounter what was probably the first local
performance of a work by his great English predecessor, Henry Purcell.
Enterprisingly staged, The
Indian Queen was played,
sung, and danced with gusto, and in the end provided a fine evening's
entertainment before a sold-out house of appropriately modest size.
I say "in the end" because the first
sounds that emerged from the period instruments assembled to the side of
the stage were a shade lacking in allure; happily, the playing, under
the direction of baroque flutist Kim Pineda, rapidly rose to the kind of
vigor and artistry expected from a line-up of highly reputed and skilled
musicians. But there were also oddities in the version of the work that
had been put together under the text-editorship of Theodore Deacon.
A note in the program made no secret of
the presenters' dismissive feelings about John Dryden's and Robert
Howard's libretto and about the viability of giving the work as
originally conceived. This, we were told, "would involve some five hours
of melodramatic and poetic tedium." Mr. Deacon had therefore decided to
effect a kind of blend of Indian
Queen elements with the
plot of Act V of Rameau's Les
Indes galantes.
In the process, what began as a
semi-opera was converted into what might be called a three-quarter
opera, by which I mean that the 17th-century genre's distinction between
principal characters who only speak and secondary ones who sing and
dance was subverted. Certain illogicalities followed from this.
Zempoalla, the Indian queen of the title, was asked to sing that
gorgeous air, "I attempt from love's sickness to fly in vain," at a
point in the action before there had been any hint that she was
suffering from the sickness in the first place. And her two vying
suitors, the Frenchman Damon and the Spaniard Don Alvaro, after vividly
demonstrating their mutual hostility at their first entry, suddenly came
back on stage having become all sweetness and light without any rhyme or
reason. (Their ostensible reconciliation soon evaporated, rather like
the cordiality of that famous Rabin-Arafat handshake back in the other
Washington in 1993.)
But if logic, and dramatic sense, were
ill served, there was still so much wonderful music to be heard, so much
fine singing and playing to be enjoyed, so much lively dancing to be
watched, and so colorful an assemblage of costumes and sets to admire
that, as I've suggested, the whole thing ended by giving me-and clearly
the rest of the audience-a great deal of pleasure and indeed fun.
Of the four principals in the cast,
Catherine Olson, as Zempoalla's trusty courtier and then lover Adario,
possesses the most distinctive voice, clarion-like in its avoidance of
romantic vibrato, yet never harsh; she sang splendidly. The Zempoalla,
Rebekah Gilmore, also sang well, but less commandingly, and there was
something not quite appropriate about her acting and deportment. Where
Ms. Olson inhabited her part with total conviction, Ms. Gilmore seemed
less at ease in hers. It is possible to essay a portrayal of authority
without quite achieving it-and authority did not sit convincingly on
this attractive and charming but hardly regal performer. Aaron Cain's
Don Alvaro was resonantly sung and wittily acted-he has a real talent
for the curled lip of disdain. Jay White, as Damon, sounded excellent in
solo passages, though he had some difficulty in projecting his voice
over the bigger ensembles. Erika Chang and Sibyl Adams did well in the
minor roles of Spirits 1 and 2. And even in its puzzling position in the
plot, "I attempt from love's sickness," like almost all of the score,
was a joy to listen to. If only Purcell had not died just two months
after his 36th birthday, Handel, when he appeared on the London musical
scene, might have had a far harder act to follow.
Bernard Jacobson