For its second night and its second production this summer, Garsington Opera unveiled a timely new production of Vivaldi’s 1734 opera L’Olimpiade. The 21st-century athletes in training on stage and saffron-clad priests who attended the sacred flame had some chance of keeping their body temperatures above freezing. Meanwhile, one could only sit, with chattering teeth, marvelling at the absurdity of an audience paying in three figures to endure lashing rain, quagmire picnicking and an auditorium open to the five winds.
One absurdity followed another: Vivaldi’s impenetrably complex plot mixes rivalry in the games with rivalry in love, and as many cases of confused identity as it’s possible to stuff into seven tedious scenes. David Freeman, directing, was hard put to decide how much of it all was worth sending up, and how much to play straight. For, in amongst the numerous arias written solely to gratify the egos of his castrati soloists, Vivaldi did contrive some music of genuinely engaging emotion. And singers such as Emily Fons, the outstanding American mezzo who plays the trouser role of Megacle, gave voice to her agony of conflicting loyalties with a commitment that fired a gloriously well-toned voice.
So Freeman gave time and expressive space for her music, and that of her friend Licida (Tim Mead, a robust and gleaming countertenor), and her lover Aristea (the Italian mezzo Rosa Bove). When it came to Licida’s own lover Argene (the glowing soprano Ruby Hughes) attempting to hurl him off the sacrificial altar to sacrifice herself instead, the staging descended into heavy-handed farce. The presence of gliding model sheep amongst the bronze Olympic statuary also hinted at a director somewhat desperate to distract the ear from Vivaldi’s endless sequences.
Freeman’s pentathlon, though, with running all around the stage and the auditorium, was a real coup. So was the casting of the dark baritone Riccardo Novaro, who phrased King Clistene’s music with regal sophistication. Laurence Cummings’s musical direction (including a subtle paste-in, Vivaldi-style, of Chariots of Fire) of a new critical edition of the opera, played superbly on modern instruments, was inspired and inspiring throughout.
Box office: 01865 361636, in repertoire to June 29