PERSIAN KINGS had a mixed press in the ancient world. Jews remembered Cyrus, who conquered Media and Babylon and pushed Persia westward across the Tigris and Euphrates, as freeing them from captivity under Nebuchadnezzar and from centuries of battering under Babylon and, before that, Assyria.
Greece dubbed Cambyses (Cyrus’s son) a tyrant, and yet admired the usurper Darius the Great, conqueror of Bulgaria and the Ukraine, even though he turned his army on Athens, meeting his nemesis at Marathon.
The staging of Vivaldi’s L’Incoronazione di Dario this summer by Garsington Opera, the late Leonard Ingrams’s versatile company, was the first in a series of Vivaldi productions planned as the company, now led by the former artistic director of Glyndebourne, Anthony Whitworth Jones, hunts for a new Oxfordshire venue.
Not a large role, King Darius was terrifically sung by Paul Nilon, who was the centrepiece last autumn of Opera North’s imaginative staging of The Fortunes of King Croesus, by Handel’s Hamburg predecessor and successor Reinhard Keiser. That is an opera about another potentate who gets his come-uppance. Nilon will also sing the Homeric king Idomeneo in Graham Vick’s staging of Mozart’s mature opera seria for his Birmingham Opera Company in August.
Spartans and Athenians alike abhorred Xerxes, who assailed them with a sprawling army and Spanish-type armada, but came unstuck thanks to Themistocles, Pausanias, and a series of unusually lucky storms. Xerxes’s abler son, Artaxerxes I, made forays into Greek waters until Kimon, son of Miltiades (the victor of Marathon), put paid to them for a further 50 years, at which point Athens-Sparta rivalry again laid vulnerable Greece open to Persian intrigue. Artaxerxes was the eponymous hero of a magnificent full-length opera by Thomas Arne staged this summer in Oxford by New Chamber Opera.
The great 18th-century librettists, notably Metastasio, rarely let one down, and all this history might seem ripe for operatic treatment; but Vivaldi’s operas were not his strongest suit (a recent Barbican Hall offering was a damp squib). Garsington, however, set about its task with its usual aplomb.
Dario — lithe and colourful, if also fairly trite — was conducted with wit, wisdom, and mastery by the Royal Academy of Music’s Laurence Cummings. The plot, only tendentially historical (unlike Keiser’s Croeso), suffered marginally from the staging by David Freeman, which could have had greater clarity, given that audiences would be unfamiliar with the work. Several women’s voices — Katherine Manley; the New Zealander Wendy Dawn Thompson; and (best of all) the Croatian mezzo Renata Pokupic — were a sheer delight.
Arne’s Artaxerxes is, for my money, a work of a much higher order. The libretto is wordy, and the character roles (as in Handel) are not without their complications; but this was a stupendous performance from a company that has staged Arne before to splendid musical effect (The Judgement of Paris and Thomas and Sally). This performance had been moved from New College gardens, Oxford, into the college antechapel, owing to sousing weather.
New Chamber Opera’s inventive and painstaking artistic director, Michael Burden, has for 15 years proved what can be achieved with young postgraduate and undergraduate singers. Now is the time for the production values to be upped; for the music, with the period Band of Instruments under their first-class conductor, Steven Devine, could scarcely have been bettered.
What we need next from NCO is genuine visual drama. That means engaging a top young director like the Royal Opera House’s Thomas Guthrie or Mahogony Opera’s Frederic Wake-Walker. Then this hard-working company really will enter the big league. New College’s chorus again excelled, as one might expect. All leads, including Joanne Edworthy’s Prince Arbace, the central figure, did well, but Merryn Gamba (Mandane) was the ringing triumph of the evening.
Birmingham Opera Company’s new community production of Mozart’s Idomeneo runs on 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, and 23 August at The Sherborne Building, Ladywood, Birmingham B16 0PP. Full details at www.birminghamopera.org.uk
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