Review of La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina – 17th century rarities that are fun when they forget to be serious | Opera

THere there is magic in the air at this year’s Buxton Festival – and it’s not just hops from the local brewery. Witches, witches and fairies curse and enchant their way through a trilogy of operas from three different centuries. Handel and Pauline Viardot are looking after the 18th and 19th cycles respectively, but bringing the cauldron to a boil is Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero of 1625 – the oldest surviving opera by a woman.

It was first performed at the Medici court – which was then under the rule of regent Maria Maddalena of Austria – and it is no coincidence that the work on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso takes on a more girl-power vibe than most. The warrior Ruggero has become a captive in love, while the witches Alcina (the evil one) and Melissa (the good one) fight over him. Add a chorus of Alcina’s former lovers (now reduced to plants and shrubs) and you get a delicious, semi-serious mythological romp whose first performance apparently ended with a horse ballet.

Director Eloise Lally is too sublime for such silliness, and what we get from her and the young Buckinghamshire company Vache Baroque is a meditation on power and systems of power that are at their best when they forget to be serious and are just as much fun as Jonathan Darborn’s band.

Complemented by the instrumental works of his Florentine contemporaries, Caccini’s flexible, expressive music pulses with color and idiomatic energy: three registers weave and weave in silvery parallel, answered by a trio of burps. The violins dance and sway to the rhythms of theorbo and guitar, the texture now sandy, now gilded, its surface always studded with textural interest.

Lali and designer Zahra Al Mansoori give us a pastoral experience through Skid Row. Ruggero (John Stensby) is blindfolded and tied to a dirty shower curtain, while Melissa’s henchmen wear tracksuits, and making Alcina potions looks a lot like cooking meth. The problem is that once the stakes are dramatically raised, the music has to follow suit, and with the exception of Stainsby, whose impassioned confrontation with Alcina swells wonderfully, these voices are undersized—full of detail and inflection, but lacking in the ability to produce large-scale psychodrama.

Camilla Seale’s Alcina doesn’t offer much, her brooding intensity and mezzo containment outshined by Phoebe Rayner’s bright, beautifully sung Melissa. Harriet Burns stands out in a variety of supporting roles – her beautifully fluid soprano in Caccini’s sensual, upper-voiced ensembles – and Filippo Tuerkheimer packs plenty of vocal personality into his wonderful turn as Neptune.

There was no horse ballet, which was disappointing, but Liberazione still cast a powerful musical spell.