Opera San Jose presented Handel’s Xerxes several years ago, and I confess that I remembered very little of it. I did remember that Amastre loves Xerxes, who has got the hots for Romilda, who is in love with Arsamene, who returns her love; meanwhile, Atalanta is smitten with Arsamene. As our excellent pre-performance speaker (John Prescott) said, if you are going to have a comedy, what’s better than a love triangle? Two love triangles!
Xerxes is one of just a few Handel comedies, and Berkeley West Edge took that idea and ran with it, with lots of inventive stage business. Just one example: during an orchestral interlude, Arsamene and Romilda strip down to their skivvies, hop under the covers, and a lot of ill-defined “action” takes place under the covers. After a little bit of this, who should appear from under the bed but Atalanta, with a pair of very wide eyes.
The sets were simple, consisting of a wire-frame tree (in two dimensions) to which Xerxes can sing “Ombrai mai fu” and later hang photos of Romilda on, and a bed that keeps getting rolled on and off the stage. Add a framed bedroom window that can drop down from on high, and a couple of stepladders next to the window, and a collection of silhouettes of triremes to form Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont, and that’s all.
Our cast:
Xerxes: Paula Rasmussen
Romilda: Angela Cadelago
Arsamene: Ryan Belongie
Atalanta: Anna Slate
Amastre: Sonia Gariaeff
Elviro: Donald Sherrill
Ariodate: Roger McCracken
Of these, the two lovers Romilda and Arsamene were the standouts. Angela Cadelago sang beautifully, and looked as good as she sang, while Ryan Belongie made a strong argument for using a countertenor rather than a mezzo. Sonia Gariaeff, who has made quite an impression the few other times I have heard her, had a fairly small part; I would have liked to have heard more of her.
Bottom line, a delightful presentation of an instance of a genre that I’ve not yet come to fully appreciate—a beta.
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Thank you so much! :)
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