It is always important to be present in our masterpiece scenes like this. Julius Caesar from Handel, which appeared in a concert version at El Real on February 19 and 21 and now returns to the Palau de les Arts stage in Valencia (February 28, March 4, 8, 11 and 13) in a Cologne Opera production.
In some of the English composer’s plays, behavior, attitudes, feelings, contrasts between psychology are described, so sure. Life in its fullness, love and affection, joy and hope, hatred and intrigue, often depicted in a demented form, are vividly reflected in music of enormous intensity, rhythmic diversity of pasmos, impressive melodic beauty. Voices are handled with care and with an ending they can hope for one of the purest creators of bel canto.
This is where the book is taken from: pre-metastatic and extremely complicated. There are constant and urgent changes of scene, amorous and courtly intrigues; wars, days and comings… All delivered in one sumptuous orchestrationthe most refined and varied of the author, who embodies, for example, four trumpets, in two different keys, and this sound is formed in the symphony that opens the final scene, with the enlivening echoes of the triumph of love.
The moving score has everything: symphonic movements, da capo arias, accompanying recitatives, cavatinas, duos, small joints, choruses… It is strange, and not rare in these operas, Manicheism: The Romans are good; Egyptians, malos.
A heroic-political construction whose meaning has little to do with the events narrated. Cesar is a stone cartoon character: he has no more personality than a talking statue. Don’t worry or let yourself go, it’s ecstatic. Four of them portray us as an intelligent warrior. We show him in his loving clothes.
Aspects that, along with many others and referring to the same characters — hasta ocho, with Cleopatra in the lead — contribute to the writing of the score moments of extreme beautysubjugantes, like the Queen’s famous aria I will weep my fate, sung in these performances by the scented, satiny and boisterous Valencian lyric soprano Marina Monzó.
On the other hand, he will tend like César to the American singer Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in his debut in Spain a few months after his presentation at the Salzburg Festival.
In several of Handel’s works, many certain behaviors, attitudes, feelings, contrasts between psychology…
The rest of the department offers guarantees: Sara Mingardo will be Cornelia; Arianna Venditelli, Sesto; Cameron Shahbazi, Ptolemy; Jean Philippe McClish, Achilles; Bryan Hall, Curio; y Lora Grigorieva, Nireno. All under the command of the ever efficient Marc Minkowski with his country sound and energetic plants. The orchestra is logically the most beautiful of the Valencian Community. Directed by Vincent Boussard; Frank Philipp Schlösmann’s expedition; vestuario by Christian Lacroix; and lighting, Andreas Grüter.
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