Boy treble Elias Maedler steals the scene, as boy trebles are wont to do, early in the Katie Mitchell production of Handel's Alcina for the 2015 Aix Festival (Erato DVD) as Oberto pining for his lost father, but not a moment too soon. By then we have had ("heard" misses the point) only two arias, by the opera's leading ladies, both sung while their respective sopranos are being sexually dominated, naughtily. Oberto supplies brief relief that at last there's a character safe from sexual predation �" but no, there's still Act II.
There are worse ideas than introducing sex into Handel's opera �" which, rightly, is steadily gaining the top slot as the greatest of his stage works �" about a sorceress who turns her sexual conquests, once subdued, into animals. But Mitchell offers the crassest titillation, a shade or two of grey with the predictable props offset by costumes that would kill the sex drive of a Handelian Alberich. It tries both to make a point and to be unctuously cute about it, and everybody's the loser. Actual practitioners of S&M should, and would, take offense.
Mitchell does her superb vocal cast no favors. As if Handel's intricate music weren't torture enough, the singers are saddled with vapid, nonstop business to dispatch while they're trying to realize Handel's flesh-and-fur characters buried under the theatrical (and literal) taxidermy. Staging it on yet another of her two-tiered, six-panel unit sets (which worked well for her Written on Skin at Aix three years earlier) adds yet more distraction, not to mention actors and dancers doubling the characters, hard enough to tell apart in this typically baroque plot with its genderfuck voice assignments.
Had she noticed that the first time her production attains more than antic power is during Philippe Jaroussky's spell-binding second-act Ruggiero aria, during which he does nothing but sing like a god, she might have been inclined to trust Handel more. But if, elsewhere, you want to see Jaroussky with his shirt off, and sometimes more, this is your chance; but really you don't want to.
As a sound-only recording (just look away), this Alcina has much to recommend it. Conductor Andrea Marcon draws a dramatic, hell-bent-for-leather performance from the ace Freiburger Barockorchester and fine soloists.
Weirdly, much the same can be said for the new Pierre Audi production (Alpha, Blu-ray only) of Alcina, which hails from the other extreme of the thespian spectrum. Conceived for the Baroque-style theater at Drottningholm, this 2015 revival for Belgium's Monnaie is done in "period" (that is, roughly 18th-century) costumes and on a bare set with moveable flats. Especially by comparison with Mitchell's manic Alcina, in Audi's almost nothing happens; you're advised to arrive with a better knowledge of the piece than subtitles can provide.
But if you do, your reward is one of the great Alcina recordings, not that the competition is stiff. Out Baroque wizard Christophe Rousset drives an electrifying account of the score with his lithe period-instrument ensemble Les Talens Lyriques and an even stronger cast than Aix fielded, headed by the brilliant Alcina of longtime Rousset colleague Sandrine Piau. There's some meddling with the score (Audi deals with Handel's problematic ending by cutting it) that could not have been by Rousset's hand or with his blessing. But Alcina is a longer night in the house than some Wagner operas, so complaints will be muted.
Certainly with the absence of the late Alan Curtis, it's clear that there's no greater Handelian working today than the resourceful Rousset, who is so solidly grounded in the music's style that he can shape and attend to its drama in both short and long terms. This Alpha Alcina comes with a second Rousset-Audi Handel restaging, of the still underappreciated but dramatically incisive Tamerlano . The manner of staging is the same faux Baroque, but either Audi yields to the drama of the opera or, more likely, master dramatist Handel takes charge.
Tamerlano tells the tale of a despotic monarch with fatal female trouble, an always timely subject. Here a superlative cast is headed by Jeremy Ovenden's Bajazet (briefly, bizarrely, a Placido Domingo role), the wildest of the singers; he blows up every scene he's in and rather literally leaves it all on the field or, in this case, the throne. With terrific acting all around, this Tamerlano is compulsively watchable.
What's auguring to be a bad time for the arts is, for this perilous moment anyway, a good time for the Alcina fable. A 17th-century version, the dramatic cantata La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola di Alcina by Francesca Caccini (daughter of the somewhat better-known Roman composer Giulio Caccini) has just been released on Glossa. It's being welcomed as a rediscovered masterpiece, and the performance by period specialists Allabastrina-La Pifaresca is rightly bewitching.
The cavalcade of amazing Les Talens Lyriques releases continues with its recent Francois Couperin disc, the rarely heard solo cantata Ariane console par Bacchus (Ariadne consoled by Bacchus ), featuring out gay baritone Stephane Degout, and two of the composer's instrumental "apotheoses," here to Lully and Corelli. The playing is so strong it provides immediate uplift, which some may join me in finding welcome. I have it on continuous play.