The first-ever revival of Francesco Cavalli’s 1659 Venetian opera Elena at this year’s festival d’Aix-en-Provence is a huge treat — and a brilliant showcase for not one, but three great young countertenors that show the great state of the highest male voice around the world: American Christopher Lowrey, Brazilian Rodrigo Ferreira and Romanian Valer Barna-Sabadus.
You can catch Jean-Yves Ruf’s simple but effective staging of this musical drama based on the adventures inspired by Helen of Troy (the libretto was Giovanni Faustini’s last) on demand at medici.tv for free until the end of September here.
The audio pickup from the festival’s Théâtre du Jeu de Paume is not excellent, but the high-definition video on the small stage is a good mix of close-up and ensemble — all the better to highlight the 13 excellent singers. One of Europe’s up-and-coming Baroque specialists, Leonardo Garcia Alarcón, leads the small period orchestra from the keyboard with all manner of nice detail work.
Having three great countertenors in one production makes it easy to grasp the incredibly wide dramatic and tonal range of this voice type.
(It’s also the first classical CD I’ve noticed with the logo of a corporate sponsor — DeLonghi. Interesting.)
Barna-Sabadus sings with a lot of verve, unabashed to push emotions out rather than draw the listener in. The boldness is refreshing, but the slight oddities in the English cadence, I’m sure due to this not being the singer’s native language, rankled a bit. That said, this is an excellent effort.
The singer gets solid support from harpsichordist Olga Watts, lute player Axel Wolf and cellist Paver Serbin. You’ll find all the details here.
The current crop of 20- and 30-something countertenors is large as well as incredibly musical. It’s a bumper crop made possible by the David Daniels and Daniel Taylors of the world, back not very long ago when countertenors were curiosities and they had to work extra hard to prove to opera producers and concert presenters that their voices could belong in the mainstream productions.
There’s still a lot of work to do, though. Countertenors remain much more in demand on the other side of the Atlantic — but Christopher Lowrey did make it to the semi-finals of the Metropolitan Opera auditions earlier this year, and that is already a big accomplishment.
Here are the three stars of the opera in little clips to show off their style:
1. Valer Barna-Sabadus, pop-star-style:
2. Rodrigo Ferreira, baroque parody-style:
3. You can listen to Christopher Lowrey on this website here. I especially recommend “I know a band” from Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
John Terauds