INNSBRUCK — The mountainside summer festival here is revealing how much there is to be discovered in 17th-century repertoire. From an Antonio Caldara opera that has not been staged for three centuries to lively concert programs, the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music — which runs through Aug. 31 — offers quality programming in an unpretentious atmosphere.
Since 2023, with the appointment of Ottavio Dantone as co-artistic director, the specialized ensemble Accademia Bizantina has served as orchestra in residence. The festival also brings together seasoned performers with young singers who are discovered in its annual Cesti Competition.
Somewhat cliched, meanwhile, is this year’s motto, “Who holds the strings?, in combination with the new production of Caldara’s Ifigenia in Aulide, which was staged by the puppet company Per Poc at the Tiroler Landestheater. Directors Santi Arnal and Anna Fernández draw attention to power relations among mortals by handing female characters life-sized marionettes when they are unable to control their own destiny (for example, before Queen Clytemnestra laments the depravity of the female sex in “Povero sesso! Schiavo per tirannica legge…”). As a symbol of the destruction of warfare, the male protagonists wear warrior helmets.
Underlying the story, of course, is not the power of men over women but rather the gods’ sway over mankind: Diana, goddess of the hunt, has ordered Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greeks, to have his eldest daughter sacrificed. In this version of the myth — as per the libretto by Apostolo Zeno, who oriented himself toward Racine’s 1674 play, Iphigénie — it is revealed that the princess Elisena, rather than Iphigenia, is destined to fulfill the task. As such, she is the only character to be doubled by a marionette until the bitter end (rising from the altar while the soprano, Neima Fischer, lies lifeless onstage).
The puppets are at times intriguing but mostly distracting and at worst comical as juxtaposed with Caldara’s rich score. The opera first took the stage in 1718, shortly after Karl VI became emperor of Austria and two years after the composer took up the position of deputy kapellmeister in Vienna.
The premiere was a spectacle representing Habsburg power in the aftermath of a protracted war with the Ottoman empire. As such, the plotline of battling Greeks and Trojans and the struggle of an imperial family to consolidate power via marriage (Ifigenia is betrothed to the Thessalian prince Achilles) must have hit a sensitive nerve.
Poking fun at the top-down hierarchies in question is a potential means of overcoming the mannered or dated dimensions of the opera, but the directors’ aesthetic clashes with the music’s innate elegance. Achilles’ opening aria, “Asia tremi, Argo festeggi,” alluding to the might of Greece, was delivered by countertenor Carlo Vistoli with a touch of sarcasm that ultimately was not convincing as it was not adopted in subsequent numbers by characters such as Agamemnon and, by the third act, had disappeared entirely (the tragedy of Elisena’s impending death took over the characters’ emotions).
The first-class cast rendered the drama immediate in both musical and theatrical terms. As Iphigenia, the soprano Marie Lys brought a magnetic presence and pristine coloratura passages to her da capo arias. She captured the tearful vengeance of the aria “Addio, infido” and was moving as she beseeched her father in “Più del cielo.” Fischer, as Elisena, impressed with her bell-like timbre and expressivity as she maneuvered her marionette.
Mezzo-soprano Shakèd Bar was a seductive Clytemnestra, tenor Martin Vanberg a steadfast if tyrannical Agamemnon. The charismatic Vistoli proved a stand-out with his skillful ornamentation in da capo sections. Tenor Laurence Kilsby was technically skillful as the King of Ithaca (Ulysses) and warmed up to match the high standards for diction onstage. The baritone Giacomo Nanni rounded out the cast with subtle humor as Agamemnon’s confidant, Arcade.
Caldara demonstrates, alongside a gift for counterpoint, great powers of invention when it comes to melody and texture. This was made all the more clear by the performance of the Accademia Bizantina under Dantone at the harpsichord as the ensemble brought out moments of tension but also pathos in the music.
Arias clearly illustrate the different characters’ emotional worlds, from the inner rage of Clytemnestra in “Amasti in quel cor perfido” to the stormy ocean painted in the captain Teucro’s number “Non ti parlo di mia fede.” Achilles is granted some of the most compelling music as he resolves to win in battle and take Iphigenia’s hand in the introduction to “Sull’ali della spene, e del desio.”
In general, recitative passages move swiftly along as they introduce one aria after another. While the third act could have potentially seen cuts to speed up the action toward the final denouement, a less chaotic staging would have also allowed the audience to focus on the drama as it is told in purely musical terms.
Sets by Alexandra Semenova, hand-painted to ostensibly evoke the premiere, juxtapose allusions to ancient Greece with rococo patterns but appear amateurish and deploy clashing colors such as dark yellow and turquoise. Her costumes cast the women in striped dresses to emphasize their proverbial imprisonment in a man’s world, while banners emblazoned with warrior heads appeared onstage at climatic moments. The production represents an earnest attempt to invest this rediscovered work with fresh relevance, but less explicit symbolism and sleeker visuals might have been even more effective.
The concert “Scarlatti!” with the Accademia Bizantina at the Haus der Musik paid tribute to the tricentennial of Alessandro Scarlatti by exploring a wide spectrum of his output, from concerti grossi to comic opera scenes. As the program note explains, the composer wrote over 100 dramatic works; how odd that we don’t hear more of him in concert halls. The serenata Diana ed Endimione, exploring the interaction of the chaste goddess and the lovestruck shepherd, is most likely his first in the genre (a cross between a cantata and an opera), dating to approximately 1680. In a pre-concert talk, soprano Carlotta Colombo noted that her character is cold and stoic until the final stanzas, when she recognizes the virtues of love.
Colombo brought the lyrics to life with just the right amount of vibrato, capturing Diana’s longing, frustration, and taciturn qualities. In the duet “Tal volta l’amore,” this Diana suddenly became haughty and coquettish, then slowly compassionate. As Endimione, alto Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian wore his heart on his sleeve, emphasizing his passion as Diana resists her desire. He was at first desperate, then insistent, impressive especially in the pivotal aria “Se il rigo, che in te s’accende.” After the final aria, the two singers exchanged a long stare — Diana had learned to be less proud and more empathetic, Endimione not to despair.
Select scenes from Scarlatti’s late 17th-century Neapolitan works also proved that a concert staging can pack in more than enough drama. The young Slovenian tenor Žiga Čopi broke out into a nasal falsetto as he portrayed female characters, immediately drawing laughs, while Marco Saccardin invested his roles with a smooth baritone and communicated easily with the audience.
Scarlatti’s gift for humor came across in different guises. The cantata L’Emireno overo Il consiglio dell’ombra is full of irony as it depicts a couple who have fallen out of love, while La donna ancora è fedele, also a cantata, tells of testing a woman’s fidelity. Čopi occasionally chewed the scenery here as the seductive Filandra, but his youthful enthusiasm also breathed life into this forgotten score. Saccardin, as Selvino, was more restrained, successfully breaking the fourth wall while focusing on word painting.
In two purely instrumental works, the Accademia Bizantina performed with verve and elegance. The ensemble’s strings dispatched the Concerto grosso in F major with fluid but incisive rhythms and a vibrant tone that was ideally suited to the small, resonant concert space of the Haus der Musik. Dantone, sitting centerstage at the harpsichord, occasionally weighed in with an authoritative gesture.
The second slow Largo unfolded as a lament before the ensemble quickly switched to a spritely place for the final Allegro in the style of Scarlatti’s operatic finales. The Concerto grosso in A minor featured Alessandro Nasello as soloist on recorder (impressively, he is also the ensemble’s bassoonist). His fingerwork was striking in the inner Allegro, and the subsequent Adagio was packed with drama that foreshadows the late Baroque.
The concert culminated in the sacred work Salve Regina for quartet and strings. It was an interesting contrast to experience the singers (Colombo, Bénos-Djian, Čopi, and Saccardin) in this solemn work following their characterizations in dramatic scores. They sculpted Scarlatti’s polyphony with careful phrasing, relegating their personalities to the background and becoming one with the instrumentalists (although Čopi at one point showed signs of having tired his voice through the buffo techniques of the operatic scenes).
Back at the Landestheater, four soloists joined the ensemble L’Arpeggiata under its founder, the theorbo player Christina Pluhar, for the program Wonder Women (the title of their most recent album). While setting out to explore female composers, the concert also included numbers from their album Alla Napoletana. Vincenzo Capezzuto, a dancer whose talents as a singer were discovered by Pluhar, nearly stole the show as he stomped to a tambourine while performing “Pizzica di San Vito” (a number that was reprised as an encore, to even more elaborate choreography).
Equally vital as she moved freely to the music’s rhythms was the mezzo-soprano Luciana Mancini in, for example, the traditional Mexican number “La Bruja” about a woman who flouts society’s dictates, arranged here by Pluhar. The young mezzo-soprano Benedetta Mazzucato brought sincerity and a pure tone to Barbara Strozzi’s “L’amante consolato” and was raw and exposed in Francesca Caccini’s “Lasciatemi qui solo.” The deep sorrow of compositions by women of the 17th century was marked. In Strozzi’s “L’amante segreto,” performed with poignancy by the soprano Céline Scheen, the slow lament switches to major when she states that she would rather die than let anyone discover her pain, only for the mood to become both urgent and ominous in the final stanza.
As always, the spirit of exploration and sheer joy of music-making of L’Arpeggiata was a near revelation. Pluhar manages to push generic boundaries while remaining tasteful, revealing the continuity between eras and genres. The purely instrumental number “La Dia Spagnola,” by Nicola Matteis, emerged like a jazz session in Pluhar’s arrangement, with each soloist taking the spotlight in improvisatory passages and communicating effortlessly with one another. Doron David Sherwin left a memorable impression on the cornett.
But the ensemble went a step further. As a second encore, the singers took turns vocalizing to an arrangement of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” As the accompaniment broke out into a hip-hop rhythm, Sherwin had a stint break-dancing. Overkill? Maybe. And yet the fresh individuality of the musicians onstage lent the moment authenticity. At a time of continued debate about the relevance of Western classical music in contemporary society, Pluhar and her performers proved that there is no contradiction in investing Baroque repertoire with a modern sensibility or crossing the boundaries between folk and concert music.
