San Francisco Classical Voice

EARLY MUSIC REVIEW The Unfamiliar Air of Spain

February 15, 2002

By Michelle Dulak

When Nicholas McGegan stepped down from the music directorship of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra last year, then-Executive Director George Gelles hastily put together a 2001-2 season for the orchestra. Happily, McGegan wanted (and got) his old job back within a year, but Gelles' succession of guest-conducted sets has been fascinating. Certainly PBO has never before ventured into such utterly unknown territory as it did last week. By the side of Antonio de Literes' zarzuela El estrago en la fineza, o Jupiter y Semele, conducted last Friday by Eduardo Lopez Banzo at Herbst Theater, PBO's forays into the wilder regions of the 17th century baroque (Bertali, Dumanoir and the like) look positively "standard rep."

To most American music-lovers "zarzuela" probably suggests a late-19th- or early-20th-century Spanish opera in a style and a dramatic vein somewhere between "Carmen" and "Tosca." In fact, a zarzuela is just a Spanish musical drama in which the dialogue is mostly spoken, not sung — the rough equivalent of a German Singspiel. Jupiter y Semele dates from 1718, but apart from the difference in language, the libretto might just as well belong to a Venetian opera of fifty years earlier; there's the same absurd contrivance of plot, and the same mixing of mythological gods and goddesses with low-level human characters whose only purpose is comic relief.

In purely musical terms, PBO's Jupiter y Semele was a terrific success. Eduardo Lopez Banzo, the director of the Spanish baroque ensemble El ayre espanol, directed with considerable verve. The singers were uniformly fine. The magnificent Marta Almajano, who sang the role of Jupiter, was best of all; her ringing high mezzo, nimble and yet rich, was a pure pleasure wherever she sang. Her Spanish colleague Lola Casariego, who sang the role of Cupid, was almost Almajano's match — a dark, striking mezzo-soprano voice, more agile than one would expect from the depth of the sound. Mimi Ruiz (who sang the role of Juno, Jupiter's justifiably-aggrieved wife) had a harsh, piercing edge to her sound at times, but it seemed in the end entirely appropriate to her character. And she sailed through some extraordinarily tricky music; her account of Juno's demanding first aria included some of the deftest coloratura singing I've heard in years.

Strong supporting cast

The other singers were also fine — mezzo Suzanne Elder Wallace, doubling as Semele and as the comic Enarreta, brilliant and strong; mezzo Linda Liebschutz, doubling (again) as Semele's father Cadmo and (in a marvelous comic turn) as Enarreta's suitor Satiro; and baritone Raymond Martinez in the role of Ydaspes, a foreign prince. When these three and Ruiz combined as "el cuatro" ("The Four") as a sort of chorus, the effect was marvelous.

And the music? Well, it was, in the first place, very fun. No one ought ever to assume that unfamiliar music belongs in the metaphorical garbage can just because that's where you find it. Sr. Literes had a fetching taste in tunes and an ear for unusual orchestral sonorities. I am tempted to attribute some of the juicier bits of Friday's orchestration to Banzo; at least, I can't imagine 18th c. castanet parts being notated with the detail that castanetist Luz Martin Leon-Tello supplied. But there was more to the score than castanets. Some of the arias were really striking, as were the instrumental interludes and preludes, like the number for three solo violins that opened the second act.

As drama, though, Friday's performance went nowhere. I imagine that it must have been a struggle fitting a big stage work like this into the framework of a two-hour concert performance. But Philharmonia's solution was weak. The audience was supplied with libretti (though we were asked to hand them back at the end of the performance, so that they might be re-used). Then, though the whole libretto was printed, we were informed that only parts of the spoken dialogue would be performed, and that most of it would be cut.

Cutting bits of narrative material (recitative or spoken dialogue) is reasonable enough if what remains is sufficient to carry the story. But the cuts in the Jupiter dialog sent the whole audience searching wildly through the printed libretto in the attempt to find their place, and what remained after the cuts was not drama, not even concert drama. Replacing large stretches of dialogue by an English-language summary might have made more sense; certainly it would have made more dramatic sense.

(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)