Garsington Opera’s music and motion present vibrant integration for – a much less episodic than standard – Platée – Seen and Heard Worldwide

United Kingdom Garsington Opera 2024 [1] – Jean-Philippe Rameau, Platée: Soloists, Garsington Opera Refrain, The English Live performance / Paul Agnew (conductor). Garsington Opera at Wormsley, 31.5.2024. (CR)

Manufacturing:
Director – Louisa Muller
Designer – Christopher Oram
Lighting – Malcolm RipPeth
Video designer – Matt and Rob Vale (Illuminos)
Motion director – Rebecca Howell
Refrain director – Jonathon Cole-Swinard

Forged:
Platée – Samuel Boden
La Folie – Mireille Asselin
Thespis / Mercury – Robert Murray
Momus – Jonathan McGovern
Satyr / Chitheron – Henry Waddington
Jupiter – Ossian Huskinson
Thalie – Holly Brown
Clarine – Holly Teague
Amor – Victoria Songwei Li
Juno – Annabel Kennedy
Maenads – Audrey Tsang and Nancy Holt

Again within the day when royal weddings have been carried out correctly and fewer philistine patrons commissioned the best composers to offer intensive formal operatic Entertainments for such events, Platée (1745) was a daring prospect. Regardless that Rameau didn’t start composition on it with the intention that it could perform as a part of the marriage festivities of the Dauphin, final minute adjustments following the unavailability of one of many deliberate operas by one other composer meant that this satire was improbably pressed into service.

Somewhat than comprising a critical, or clearly edifying, retelling of considered one of Jupiter’s amorous affairs, it sardonically recounts how he and Mercury try to treatment Juno of her jealousy by having Jupiter fake to fall in love with the vainglorious and unprepossessing marsh nymph, Platée (often depicted as a frog), and be wed to her, proving to Juno how ridiculous her suspicions are. Because the Dauphine was not identified for her magnificence, it was courageous to take this situation as the idea for a nuptial leisure (particularly because the nymph is written for a tenor in drag) however that appears to have incited little remark, nonetheless much less acted because the trigger for any strop by the bridal couple and withdrawing from royal duties and standing, as occurs as we speak. Somewhat, it was the Dauphin’s father, Louis XV, and his court docket who have been lower than impressed with the uNFLattering presentation of the gods, often taken in Baroque opera to be the allegorical illustration of the royal court docket on earth. It certainly wouldn’t have been troublesome for audiences to attract connections between Jupiter’s philandering and that of Louis XV.

Louisa Muller’s energetic new manufacturing for Garsington Opera brings the narrative down from the heights of Mount Olympus and forwards from Classical Greece into our time, reinterpreting it as a recent trashy actuality tv present concerning the escapades of Jupiter’s romantic life, like a satire on such programmes as Love Island or Blind Date. Olympus TV’s collection ‘Jupiter and Juno’ seems to go awry originally of the opera when the long-suffering spouse storms out, leaving a bemused manufacturing firm to place collectively hurriedly a brand new programme. Whereas Robert Murray’s lustrous, eloquent Thespis leads a brain-storming session fuelled by espresso (the sober trendy different to the grape of Bacchus truly eulogised within the opera), Momus (a slyly agile Jonathan McGovern) and Thalie (attractively sung by Holly Brown) devise a brand new present through which one other accomplice is chosen for Jupiter.

The ensuing leisure – very similar to the same old Saturday night time fare of mainstream tv channels – presents a full of life spectacle of glitzy, vibrant motion across the indolently escapist setting of a swimming pool and cocktail bar. If the sequence generally appears inconsequential, that may be mentioned to function a purposefully ironic remark upon up to date actuality tv, the merchandise of an age of mass cultural manufacturing and consumption that stand because the debased trendy variations of the inventive innovations that the figures of Thespis, Momus, and Thalie signify. The manufacturing’s choreography artfully mimics the type of such leisure throughout the succession of Rameau’s musical tableaux with its dances and interludes, roughly fixing the issue that such formal episodes in any other case delay or break up the dramatic trajectory. As an acerbic comedy about vainness and emotional irresponsibility inside the context of human romantic relationships, the opera’s ethical is sustained via this sequence with levity, in its replication of the superficial world usually contrived and promoted by tv programming as we speak which presents an unrealistic or sentimental outlook through which relationships can thrive.

The determine of Platée is solid not a lot as a caricature, and definitely not within the type of a frog, however as merely considerably misplaced on this artificially glamorous world – perhaps making an attempt too exhausting to catch consideration across the pool with a low, green-sequined costume, after which oddly dowdy in look for the sham marriage. Sam Bowden captures a number of the nymph’s extra outlandish and gauche turns of expression, however his fantastically sustained, excessive tenor singing (rightly and skilfully avoiding falsetto) expertly attracts sympathy for the character. Platée is the sufferer of nothing greater than her personal illusions and ambition, slightly than of the meretricious world through which she finds herself. As such, the manufacturing in the end downplays a few of its personal satirical intent by focusing the drama upon the non-public tragedy of the nymph’s humiliation, and never extending to a conclusion the broader social and cultural satire with which it begins.

After an unsure opening, Ossian Huskinson proves to be a suavely assured Jupiter, alongside Murray in his second half as Mercury, equally silver-tongued, and Henry Waddington’s reliable Chitheron, as they set about their mission. Mireille Asselin’s La Folie perPetuates the festivities as a DJ and compère on this re-imagining, conspicuous for her ebullient stage and vocal presence, as is also Victoria Songwei Li as Amor, between them the 2 guiding lights of this episode of ‘Jupiter and Platée’. Annabel Kennedy is a forthright, fearsome Juno.

Paul Agnew, conducting, has as a lot expertise of this opera as anyone, having each sung the title position and performed it earlier than. The English Live performance are much less practised within the French Baroque repertoire and maybe are slightly stiffer than such ensembles as Les Arts Florissants. However Agnew actually attracts from them an ideally lucid texture and instils shut consideration to element in timbre and sonority to depict the drama in music; pregnant pauses between the fidgety opening gestures of the Overture elevate expectations. Music and motion present a vibrant integration of what generally is a frustratingly episodic construction within the unique work.

Curtis Rogers