Handel: Semele
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Movie Reviews of Handel: Semele
Movie Review: Weird Staging
Summary: 2 Stars
Handel: Semele
Staging is current vintage Eurotrash. Bartoli's mezzo lies too low for Semele and she strains to produce the required volume. Nikiteaun's voice also sorely lacks the strength needed for the role and her English pronunciation is atrocious. Tenor has a lovely voice which he produces without strain, both top and bottom, Orchestral playing excellent, and it is really better to listen to the sound track than to view tortuous sludge.
Movie Review: Very disappointed!
Summary: 2 Stars
I was waiting for this release to come out with baited breath. Semele is one of my favorite handel works and I've owned the CD version with Battle and Horne with Nelson conducting. I can't tell you about this production because I found the singing to be so god-awful that I paid little attention to the staging. Bartoli is fair - although I found her sung English to be quite understandable. I feel that the other singers really ruined this performance for me. Very sorry that I bought it.Movie Review: Jupiter was an Insufferable Cad...
Summary: 1 Stars
... and, like other powerful executives of recent memory, had dubious taste in dames. But the libretto for this English opera, written by playwright William Congreve, is several notches above the average Georgian doggerel, and the music is Handel near his compositional peak. What follows here will be a critique of this specific performance and should not be read as criticism of Semele as a work of the musical stage.
This is a wretched mess of a performance. The modern sets are dreary. The orchestra is shaky. The balance of voices with orchestra is lacking in acoustic integration. But most of all, the singing is shoddy, unstylish, lacking in ensemble discipline, and OUT! OF! TUNE!
Cecilia Bartoli is the biggest name and has of course the biggest role, as Semele. Bartoli often substitutes mannerism for affective expression, but this time she takes her flouncy coyness to extremes. Worse yet, she sings most of her arias with a tight, quivery, non-ornamental vibrato. It's unclear whether she's attempting to re-legitimize the old-time fat lady's warble, or to mask the deficiencies of her tuning, but in any case she fails at both.
Liliana Nikiteanu, in the role of Ino, has such a reedy little voice, and so little control of her enunciation, that it hardly matters when she's out of tune, which is often. Believe me, it's true. Listen to her duets with Athamas, sung by high tenor Thomas Michael Allen, early in the First Act. The duets are shockingly out of tune, and I think the fault is chiefly Nikiteanu's.
Birgit Remmert (Juno) and Isabel Rey (Iris) play their roles as TV comedy, which might be presumed to justify their squawky, squeaky timbres. But they're also tragicomically OUT! OF! TUNE! altogether too often.
There's nothing especially ingratiating about the voice of bass Anton Scharinger, at least in his Baroque role of King Cadmus. His singing is bluff and robust, but not at all stylish. Nevertheless, his arias come as a relief, since he's mostly IN TUNE!
High tenor Thoams Michael Allen struggles bravely with a role (Athamas) that flings him up and down across his voice break. He has some style and he acts with expressive restraint. I'll watch for him in other productions.
William Christie is one of the finest conductors and exponents of Baroque music in the world today. It was his presence at the podium in the Opernhaus Zürich that induced me to buy this DVD. Unfortunately, the orchestra "La Scintilla" lets him down. The violins struggle raggedly to keep up with Handel's hustling sixteenth notes. The oboes are scattered at crucial passages, and in one obbligato, they are hideously OUT! OF! TUNE!
This DVD is so disappointing that I'm putting it up for re-sale immediately. Hopefully one of my pesky persistent no-voters will buy it by mistake.
Movie Review: Outrageous
Summary: 1 Stars
I did not believe the three negative reviews for this and am I sorry!!! This is in almost every respect a disaster as a production. The whole concept is shallow, foolish, badly conceived. The setting is dismal and meaningless, costumes also, direction too awful to be laughable. Indeed, it makes a tragedy of this very lovely, short and simple opera version of Semele, presented here as broad comedy, totally ignoring the poignance and tragedy of a foolish, ambitious young girl's vanity and the perfidy of men. I have seen productions when the setting of an opera has been changed, "updated" in time and place, and they have worked, due to the care with which the story is kept intact to the composer's intentions and the life of the music and story. Here, it was not.
Unfortunately, only Semele and Jupitor are outstanding singers, and Bartoli is made ridiculous in her acting, as are others in the cast whose vocal contribution is second rate. Bartoli sings well in English. The mass sex orgy, fully dressed, on the floor covered with chairs, is mind boggling. The blue satin bed is both vulgar and distracting, and Bartoli's wardrobe deserves special condemnation. Her appearance in a complete opera of such caliber is insulting to her and the opera both. It is also an insult to me and to those who respect opera and fine music as an art form to be respected, even revered. I've seen worse productions in my eighty five years, probably, but I can't remember one at the moment. I feel cheated since I could not with a conscience give my copy to anyone else or sell it. However, I would like to hear more of Workman whom I have not seen before, a fine singer and actor.
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