Company unearths gem with ‘Ifigenia’
It takes a pretty deep dive into the archives to even find the operas of the 18th century Venetian composer Giovanni Porta, let alone bring one to a modern-day stage. Yet the intrepid musical explorers of Bay Area company Ars Minerva have done both and pulled off the feat with impressive panache.
“Ifigenia in Aulide,” which opened a two-performance run at San Francisco’s ODC Theater on Friday, Nov. 30, had its premiere in Munich in 1738, and in all likelihood was never heard of again. That’s not a reflection of its artistic merits so much as the vicissitudes of musical taste — operas in the 18th and 19th century were plentiful and quickly disposable, like the formulaic movies of the studio period, and the notion of a permanent repertory was still far in the future.
So any unfamiliar opera from the era is apt to feel a little out of place in the contemporary world, removed from the stylistic language and theatrical conventions that gave it shape. Porta’s contemporaries — Handel above all — have taught us how to hear this music, and Handel tends to overshadow everyone within a 100-mile radius.
That makes it all the more remarkable that Friday’s performance, with a cast of strong singers and a small, scrappy string ensemble, led from the harpsichord by conductor Derek Tam, could present such a powerful case for this unknown piece. Porta may not have been one of the greats of his day, but the writing here is
Porta’s writing is lithe and imaginative, and the production presented it in the best possible light.
lithe and imaginative, and the production presented it in the best possible light.
The usual caveats apply. Like any Baroque opera, “Ifigenia” proceeds in a rigid alternation of recitative — the conversational, relatively faceless vocal style that carries the dramatic action forward — and florid arias that give vent to a character’s emotional state. And even with some cuts, the 3½-hour run time can be a challenge for a contemporary listener.
But there’s a theatrical vividness to much of the score that carried the proceedings along, as well as some striking moments that come as a welcome surprise. In the third and final act, for instance, Porta brings three characters on stage for a genuine vocal trio — a texture so out of the ordinary for a Baroque opera that it almost sounds like a visitor from the lush musical world of Richard Strauss.
The libretto for “Ifigenia,” drawn from Euripides, was a popular one in its day (characteristically, it was set to music by a number of composers). It finds the Greeks on their way to Troy, stymied by the lack of wind for their fleet, an obstacle that can be overcome, according to the best priestly intelligence-gathering, only if Agamemnon will sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the gods.
There are romantic entanglements as well, of course — this one loves that one, who only loves the other one — but the emotional core of the piece is in the struggles of the royal family. This is the beginning of Clytemnestra’s rage toward Agamemnon, which will eventually erupt into murder in other plays and operas.
But the plot, which can be hard to follow under the best of circumstances, is less pressing than the opportunity for vocal display, and this is where the Ars Minerva company largely shone. Soprano Aura Veruni gave a vivid, tonally rich performance as Ifigenia. She was well matched by the robust, expansively scaled Agamemnon of mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz, who sang strongly throughout before unleashing the truly big guns in her torrential Act 3 aria, and the bright-toned Clytemnestra of soprano Shawnette Sulker.
But the star of the evening was the young San Francisco soprano Cara Gabrielson in a role (Elisena) that has no counterpart in Euripides. Gabrielson gave a performance of remarkable grandeur and precision, singing with vibrant color and a beautifully modulated range of expressive techniques; her every contribution to the proceedings was reason to sit up and take notice.
The company’s founding artistic director, Céline Ricci, not only sang the role of Achilles, deploying her wizardly coloratura to great effect, but also staged the piece in resourceful and bare-bones fashion. The design scheme, which presented the Greeks as some kind of purple-green race of Klingon cousins, neither helped nor hindered the production.
Ultimately, the point of this exhumation project, which has been the stock-in-trade of Ars Minerva for its several years of existence, is not to discover forgotten masterpieces; we’re well supplied with those. Rather, it is to pull the camera back to include a fuller view of the musical past, in all its range and complexity. That’s a task that the current production handles admirably.