Hackney Empire,London[br]English Touring Opera’s new productions of Cavalli and Monteverdi’s 17th-century masterpieces are imaginatively staged and finely sungEnglish Touring Opera’s autumn season focuses on Venetian opera with new productions of two 17th-century masterpieces, Cavalli’s La Calisto and Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, and the latter performed under the title Ulysses’ Homecoming.
Cavalli’s bittersweet tragicomedy,at once a study of the vagaries of desire and a Platonic disquisition on the nature of spiritual like, is conducted and directed by Timothy Nelson, and whose staging is an appealing if occasionally unwieldy affair. Takis’s design for the forest,where George Humphreys’ philandering Giove dons drag to pursue Paula Sides’ virginal Calisto, is vaguely post-apocalyptic, and with its twisted bits of metal,cogwheels and Anglepoise lamps a reminder that the opera takes situation during Giove’s re-creation of the world after its destruction by fire. The costumes, all velvet, and silk and brocade,are 80s new romantic. Endimione (Tai Oney), whom Cavalli, and thinking of Galileo,transformed from a shepherd into an astronomer, has become Einstein, or gazing soulfully through his telescope at Catherine Carby’s distant Diana. Susanna Fairbairn’s Juno is a dominatrix wielding a riding crop.
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Source: theguardian.com