★★★★☆
Devised and conducted by Ian Page, Classical Opera’s Mozart 250 project provides a context to Mozart’s development through performances of the music he heard, year by year. If last April’s staging of JC Bach’s Adriano in Siria (1765) revealed only prettiness and professionalism from the pen of the “London Bach”, this concert performance of Niccolò Jommelli’s Il Vologeso (1766) revealed a work of startling originality. Trimmed of four numbers, with three more reduced to a third of their original length, this drama of concealed identities, forgotten vows, unwanted seduction and belated clemency in Roman-occupied Ephesus is packed with incident and musical invention.
Staging it might prove tricky. Thrown to the lions by the lustful Emperor, Lucio Vero (Stuart Jackson), the Parthian King Vologeso (Rachel Kelly) is joined in the arena first by his fiancée, Berenice (Gemma Summerfield), then by Lucio Vero. Together they cow the big cats, only for the emperor to resume his wooing of Berenice, which culminates in him presenting an object that he claims is Vologeso’s severed head. Only when the emperor’s fiancée, Lucilla (Angela Simkin), and the Roman ambassador, Flavio (Jennifer France), instigate a regime change, restoring Vologeso to the throne, does Lucio Vero repent.
Jommelli packs twice as many orchestral colours and melodic details into each aria as his contemporaries, as though stress-testing opera seria conventions. With expressive and well-focused singing from the sopranos Summerfield and France, the mezzos Kelly and Simkin, the tenor Jackson and the countertenor Tom Verney as Aniceto, this was an impressive modern premiere. Page kept the tempos crisp, ensuring tremendous variety of articulation and atmosphere in Act III, with flinty bowing and smoky woodwind. Il Vologeso emerges as a vital link between the baroque and the classical, between Naples and Venice, and Stuttgart and Ludwigsberg, with characterisation of unusual sophistication and emotional volatility.