New York Times
October 31, 2007

Music Review
Bounty of Countertenors in 1631 Opera

By STEVE SMITH


Damien Guillon, left, and José Lemos of Les Arts Florissants in "Il Sant’Alessio."

New York performances by William Christie and his brilliant early-music ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, have long been dependable sources not only of historical elucidation but also of vibrant entertainment. Such was the case when the group presented "Il Sant’Alessio," an opera by the 17th-century Roman composer Stefano Landi, at the Rose Theater of Lincoln Center on Monday night.

The work, composed in 1631 and now considered the earliest extant opera dealing with a historical subject, represents the point at which the papacy took an active interest in opera, at the time a northern Italian novelty.

Landi, a papal chorister, composed "Il Sant’Alessio" for a complement of boys and men, including castrati. Mr. Christie, who made a masterly recording of the work with singers of both sexes in 1995, presented it here in a semistaged performance directed by Benjamin Lazar, with an all-male cast that included nine accomplished countertenors, a number that might have seemed implausible not so long ago.

To listeners not vested in the mysteries of the Roman Catholic Church, the story that inspired "Il Sant’Alessio" might seem unfathomably cruel. Based on a libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi (who later became Pope Clement IX), the opera deals with the final days of St. Alexis, who abandoned his patrician household in pursuit of spiritual truths. At the outset of the opera Alessio has returned from a lengthy pilgrimage. Unbeknown to his grieving kin, he lives under a staircase in the family house.

Precious little action takes place onstage: Alessio’s family laments its loss in a series of dolorous recitatives, and the future saint turns up incognito to prevent them from seeking him out. His identity is revealed when his dead body is discovered, at which point his kin are instructed to rejoice at his ascension.

To present a more tangible conflict, Landi and Rospigliosi invented Demonio, a satanic character who tempts Alessio to abandon his faith. The bass Luigi de Donato brought the role to life with a manly swagger and pitch-black low notes. The bawdy antics of family servants, Curtio and Martio, presented with brio by the countertenors Damien Guillon and José Lemos, provided welcome comic relief.

More significant, Landi dug into Alessio’s psychology, rendering his anguish something deeply felt. Philippe Jaroussky, a mellifluous countertenor, invested the role with a heartbreaking conviction. Two more countertenors, Max Emanuel Cencic and Xavier Sabata, offered flamboyant yet wrenching performances as Alessio’s wife and mother. Alain Buet, a bass, provided the opera’s most sympathetic character as Eufemiano, Alessio’s father.

Adding to the bounty of impressive countertenors were Jean-Paul Bonnevalle (as Nutrice, the family nurse), Terry Wey (representing both Rome and religion itself) and Pascal Bertin (Nuntio). The male choristers of Les Arts Florissants and the boys’ choir La Maîtrise de Caen made significant contributions, and Mr. Christie’s agile instrumentalists provided accompaniment keenly attuned to every emotional twist and turn.

 

THE TIMES
October 26, 2007

Sant’ Alessio

Geoff Brown at the Barbican

Some other world venues this autumn are experiencing Stefano Landi’s 1631 musical drama Il Sant’ Alessio fully blown, with scenery, props, assorted furbelows and authentic 17th-century candlelight. Cut-price London saw the show semi-staged. The only props were a loaf of bread and a paper note. The saintly hero – the 5th-century scion of a Roman patrician, famous in legend for spending 17 years living undetected under a staircase in his father’s house – wore casual black. Choral attire: T-shirts.

But whatever the level of staging, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, masters of the historical curio, are serving the same rum entertainment. Not what we’d call an opera, quite, though it’s a step towards one: a lolloping mix of improving sacred drama heavy on recitative and comic interludes, with a title character whose only action seems to be ascending into heaven. All this plus eight counter-tenors.

Since Alessio was sung by Philippe Jaroussky, ringingly fluid and agonised, we were close to heaven each time his mouth opened. Frustrating, then, that Alessio spends most time mute on the floor, either dead or awaiting his cue. Still, Benjamin Lazar’s semi-staging tried to make amends. Luigi de Donato’s Devil and his grimacing henchmen were always fun. José Lemos and Damien Guillon, as his father’s pages, chewed up the stage with 17th-century "comedy". Max Emanuel Cencic and Xavier Sabata, Alessio’s wife and mother, drooped with enjoyable vocal sighs; Cencic’s emotional penetration, indeed, almost rivalled Jaroussky’s. And everyone decorated themselves with Baroque hand gestures: extolling, imploring, flipping the wrists.

As a composer, Landi, a contralto singer in the Sistine Chapel, isn’t in the Monteverdi class. He can be arid. But Christie’s young forces lapped up the juices when they appeared: in Alessio’s aria welcoming death, in the great trio of family lamenting, in the demons’ mischief. Enjoying an adventurous half-term holiday, La Maîtrise de Caen children’s choir contributed their own pleasures. Pitch wobbled, but they were fresh and honest. And they usefully told us that, for all Landi’s curlicues, his allegories and artifice, this was a drama about fallible, breathing human beings, performed by the same.

 

playbill
September 22, 2007

Stairway to Heaven

By Adam Wasserman

William Christie and the period-instrument ensemble Les Arts Florissants return to Lincoln Center Oct. 29 and 30 with a little-known religious opera.

By the standards accorded to most operatic protagonists, the eponymous saint of Roman Baroque composer Stefano Landi's 1632 dramma musicale, Il Sant'Alessio, is an unlikely hero. Based on the life of the fifth-century mendicant, Alexius, Landi's saint spends the last days of his earthly existence welcoming death while disguised as a peasant camped out under a stairway in his own father's house; he allows himself to be abused by the hired help and imagined dead by his anguished family. Like Melville's scrivener, Alessio is a soul utterly etched by pathos and self-imposed privations — a character who would "prefer not to" when confronted with the simple comforts of life. All this might seem like an inert plot for an opera considered a masterpiece of the early Baroque, were it not for the fact that Landi made certain that his saint could sing.

The opera, says William Christie — who this month brings his superlative period-instrument orchestra, Les Arts Florissants, and a first-rate cast of voices to Lincoln Center's Great Performers series for two semi-staged concert performances of the rarity in the Rose Theater — is remarkable for the depth with which it plumbs the psychology of its main character, sung here by acclaimed French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. "Nothing really happens, essentially. There is no great violence as there is in other Baroque works," says Christie. "Instead, we are talking about the spiritual life of someone who's chosen a rather unusual path to follow — to renounce life, to become holy."

Commissioned by brothers Taddeo and Cardinal Francesco Barberini — nephews of Pope Urban VIII — in honor of the 1631 Roman carnival season, Il Sant'Alessio stands as a thrilling synthesis of Baroque sonorities and styles. Landi, a contralto in the Sistine Chapel's papal choir, evokes the choral writing and counterpoint of Palestrina, the word-painting of a Monteverdian madrigal or arietta, and overture-like canzonas. "I don't think you can talk about a single, defining aesthetic in the 1620s and '30s. Everything was up for grabs. And this is obviously one of those pieces in which you sense something new is happening," says Christie. "It's got the marvelous sort of rhythmic drive, and a very similar wonderful melodic simplicity to Monteverdi. It has the same kind of timbre and color you get from a small string orchestra with a very large continuo. The salient point, the big difference, is that we're talking about, essentially, a Roman choral-opera. The choir is omnipresent. It organizes and sort of defines the space as well." For the Rose Theater performances, the choral duties will be assumed by la Maîtrise de Caen, an acclaimed boys choir hailing from the Lower-Normandy capital.

If the work were esteemed for its music alone, Sant'Alessio might warrant a footnote in the annals of opera and the occasional performance excerpt. But the work's libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi — who later become Pope Clement IX — is a similarly masterful hodgepodge of tragedy, commedia dell'arte, Counter-Reformation fervor, and supernatural spectacle that imparts genuine dramatic impetus to Alessio's ascension; the text also happens to be the first based on the life of a real person. "The libretto has everything," says Christie. "Rospigliosi understood that you can mix tragedy and comedy, light and heavy, tragic and less tragic — or even frivolous — and things work. It's that same mix essentially that one gets in a good Shakespeare play."

Director Benjamin Lazar, whom Christie contacted following Lazar's acclaimed production of Molière and Lully's comédie-ballet, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in France several seasons ago, agrees. "What is often difficult in opera is not little action, but a bad text. I like operas where the libretto is created by a real writer, and Rospigliosi is one of the best Italian librettists of this period," observes Lazar. "He perfectly employs the principle of Horace — docere et delectare, to teach and to entertain."

Lazar, a specialist in Baroque gesture and rhetoric, directs fully staged productions of Sant'Alessio in Caen, Paris, Nancy, and Luxembourg, but says that he intends to conserve the opera's distinct dramatic energy in the semi-staged New York performances. "Work on gesture helps me animate the long dialogues between the characters," he says. "If a singer plays only the feelings, without working on the rhetorical aspects of the text, he can't find the real energy of the recitar cantando — which was directly inspired by the art of rhetoric of ancient Rome — and it becomes boring. It would be like playing Landi with piano and modern violin — you wouldn't be able to find the appropriate energy."

While both Christie and Lazar are essentially purists of their respective fields, they plan to present Landi's opera in a way that is at once historically informed and forward-looking — employing the types of educated approximations that have come to define the ongoing period-instrument and Baroque opera revivals. While Les Arts Florissants' superb 1996 Erato recording of Il Sant'Alessio utilized a mix of male and female voices — with Alessio being sung by French soprano Patricia Petibon — here Christie and Lazar have recruited a cast consisting almost entirely of countertenors, the modern equivalents of the voices heard during the era of castrati in which Landi lived. Perhaps most notably, the casting includes countertenors Xavier Sabata, Max Emanuel Cencic, and Jean-Paul Bonnevalle in the archetypal female roles of Mother, Wife and Nurse, respectively (boys and castrati would have been cast in the roles during the Church's prohibition against women on stage).

The curious authenticity of male treble voices in female roles is a dramatic and musical revival effort that Christie feels audiences are ready for. "When I was recording the opera, I just didn't have this extraordinary luxury of having these kinds of male soprani and male alti as I do today," remarks Christie. "So I thought, given the fact that we've got some extraordinary male falsetto voices on the market right now, why don't we try an all-male cast as was done back in those days?"

For Lazar, the casting of men in female roles highlights the inherent dramatic challenges of presenting any theatrical work, regardless of its origin or ideology. "In Japan, India, or China, the female roles are played by men in traditional theater, and nobody in the audience laughs, except when the actor wants to make them laugh — I assure you that Japanese people do cry when the geisha is dying, and everybody believes the situation. A French spectator who witnessed the first production of Il Sant'Alessio in 1632 wrote that the audience was totally excited, sighing, crying, especially when the castrati and boys were singing. That is the power of theater."

Christie concurs, noting that, despite the otherworldly elements, the opera's draw is universal. "It's a story that has great feeling," he says. It deals with human suffering and human tragedy and human emotions. As in all good operas ... it's all about human drama."

Adam Wasserman writes for Opera News.

http://www.playbillarts.com/features/article/7069.html