Yet Mr Alden did not appear to believe that Handel’s brilliantly conceived displays of vocal prowess were entertainment enough on their own, and insisted on adding unreasonable physical demands, often to the detriment of the singers: thus Morgana, in her opening aria, was picked up and wheeled around by a half-man/half-gorilla during her most complex coloratura passage, and Oronte was forced to navigate his own first-act showpiece while leaping around and engaging in unnecessary pratfalls. The first act was overly fussy and occasionally chaotic, but it was also entertaining enough to build up a certain amount of good will. Santa Fe Opera Festival 2017 © Ken Howard for Santa Fe Opera, 2017 Yet in trying so hard to play scenes for obvious, crowd-pleasing laughs Mr Alden ended up with something closer to sketch comedy, over-seasoned with a song-and-dance slapstick that seemed largely out of tune with the words, the music, and the fundamental tragedy of the story.Įlza van den Heever (Alcina) in Haendel's Alcina. The idea that Alcina can be played as a low-brow comedy – that there is more room in the libretto for innuendo than the designation of opera seria might suggest – is not wholly indefensible. Mr Alden was scrupulous in infusing each scene with its own ideas, mood and visual character but the ingenuity of the individual moments never quite worked together to achieve dramatic unity. The problem is, it didn’t quite work: the concept was a rough fit with the story from the beginning, and further attempts to make it cohere led, at best, to a kind of narrative confusion. In Mr Alden’s concept – he claims, in the programme note, to have been inspired by Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo – the island of Alcina is reimagined as an ornate old cinema where Ruggiero goes to escape the drudgery of his suburban life and a presumably-boring marriage to Bradamante (it’s hard to imagine how being married to the greatest warrior-maiden in all of Christendom would be boring, but there you go).
The story, as it appears in the opera, concerns the knight Ruggiero who, under the influence of a magic spell, has fallen in love with the sorceress Alcina and forgotten about his betrothal to Bradamante, who arrives on Alcina’s island determined to rescue her beloved. Mr Alden’s production – which first appeared in Bordeaux and Madrid, but was revised for the Santa Fe stage – contained too many fascinating ideas and high-conceptual flourishes to be written off as thoughtless or merely lazy.
The staging of David Alden, however, proved altogether more frustrating. Under the direction of Harry Bicket, Alcina – one of the five works presented at this summer’s Santa Fe Opera – was given a performance of tremendous vitality, and the dazzling arias were brought to life by a consistently strong group of soloists. In Alcina, the third of his operas based on episodes from Ariosto’s epic, Handel used the libretto from an extant Italian opera as his point of departure for nearly three hours of memorable melody, brisk recitative, and more than a few ostentatious displays of vocal brilliance.
Handel rarely had trouble finding good material for new operas, but the scenarios borrowed from Orlando Furioso seem to have inspired some of his greatest music. Elza van den Heever (Alcina), Anna Christy (Morgana), Jacquelyn Stucker (Oberto), Daniela Mack (Bradamante), Paula Murrihy (Ruggiero), Alek Schrader (Oronte) and Christian Van Horn (Melisso).
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