Tag Archives: panzarella

Ercole amante

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Cavalli’s Ercole amante was written for the wedding of Louis XIV to Marie-Thérèse, a Habsburg princess.  The marriage itself being the seal on the French victory over Spain in the war that had lasted until 1659.  It’s an odd work considering.  It’s not nearly as weird as, say, Il Giasone or La Didone but it’s hardly what one would expect for the nuptials of Le Roi Soleil.  It’s clear from both the Prologue and the ending that Ercole is Louis but he’s also a most unlikeable character.  In this version of the Hercules story he’s in love with his son’s (Hyllo) girlfriend (Iole) and will stop at nothing to bed her including casting off his wife (Deianira), imprisoning his son and bumping off Iole’s father.  In the end he’s attacked by the spirits of various people he has wronged before succumbing to the trick with the centaur’s poisoned shirt.  He’s made immortal and paired off with Hebe in the heavens but it’s hardly a tale of kingly virtue or marital fidelity.  For good measure, along the way a good chunk of the Graeco-Roman pantheon make an appearance.

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Honest Injun?

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I confess to having mixed, nay conflicted, feelings about the 2003 Palais Garnier recording of Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes.  On the one hand there is some really good music, idiomatically played and sung by musicians utterly at home in this repertoire, there’s some brilliant dance; both the choreography and the execution, and there is spectacle on a grand scale.  On the other hand there’s a nagging sense of cultural appropriation and, perhaps worse, a feeling that the whole thing may just be a giant piss take.  Actually in some ways it’s all of the above and if one can get into the spirit of the thing it sort of works.

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Brotherly love

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Rameau’s Castor et Pollux is a tragédie lyrique in five acts.  It’s a mythology based libretto which, ultimately, celebrates the fraternal love of the twins who rise to immortality while rather callously discarding the female human love interest.  Pierre Audi’s 2008 production for De Nederlandse Opera nods both to the baroque and to the mythological by staging the work in a rather abstract Sci-Fi sort of way but with moving sets and Fx that suggest, rather than reproduce, the stagecraft of the baroque.

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Beyond Good and Evil

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Rameau’s Zoroastre is a tragédie lyrique in five acts.  It’s basically a story of love, power and revenge coupled with a metaphysical struggle between Good and Evil.  It has a seriously convoluted plot involving demons, incantations, good and evil spirits, a magical talisman book and human sacrifice.  Watching the illustrated synopsis on the disk is strongly recommended!  Being the baroque French beast that it is this work also has lots of ballets.  Pierre Audi’s production was staged and filmed at the court theatre at Drottningholm and is a sort of almost, but not quite, HIP concept, somewhat akin to Robert Carsen’s production of Les Boréades.

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