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| Atsushi Sakai (viola da gamba) and Bruno Helstroffer (theorbo) at PS.Halle, Einbeck for the 2024 Internationale Händel Festspiele Göttingen |
This 12 months’s Göttingen Worldwide Handel Pageant takes place from 16 to 25 Could 2025, as soon as extra underneath the creative directorship of George Petrou, who has prolonged his contract as director till 2031. This 12 months’s theme is fame and honour, energy and glory, and the principle occasions on the pageant are a brand new manufacturing of Handel’s Tamerlano, Handel’s oratorio Solomon which can be carried out in Göttingen and on the Elbphiharmonie in Hamburg, and a gala live performance with the mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg. Tamerlano options Lawrence Zazzo within the title function with Louise Kemény as Asteria, Juan Sancho as Bajazet, and Yuriy Mynenko as Andronico, while Solomon options Lena Sutor-Wernich within the title function and Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli within the three soprano roles plus James Approach as Zadok.
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| George Petrou (Photograph: FreddieF) |
However there may be tons extra Handel within the pageant as properly, and live shows showcasing what George Petrou refers to as their fantastic orchestra, the FestspielOrchester Göttingen. There’s ensemble freymut in Couperin’s Les Nations, the Calmus Ensemble exploring each Byrd and birds, Mayumi Hirasaki, Christoph Dangel and Kristian Bezuidenhout in a chamber music tour of Italy, viol virtuoso Hille Perl and her interval instrument ensemble Los Otros take us to the French courtroom, Tra Noi give us music from these within the circle of Cardinal Ottoboni together with in fact George Frideric, but additionally Domenico Scarlatti, Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Caldara and Antonio Vivaldi. The pageant’s former creative director, Nicholas McGegan returns to have a good time his seventy fifth birthday and amongst the lunchtime live shows there may be the prospect to heard George Petrou displaying his keyboard abilities. There’s additionally the joy of the eighth annual Göttingen Handel Competitors which invitations younger ensembles from around the globe to compete.
Along with varied venues in Göttingen, quite a few occasions can even happen within the area of southern Decrease Saxony, in Duderstadt, Friedland, Scheden, Einbeck, Herzberg am Harz and Hann. Münden, and we all know from our experiences final 12 months that many of those locations are visually and traditionally partaking too.
The selection of works is partly the way in which issues labored out and partly deliberate selection. Final 12 months, the pageant introduced a contemporary pasticcio, Sarasine, as the principle operatic work. The thought was to create a drama our of the varied arias rejected by Handel which have been by no means revised or recycled. This was one thing of a novelty, an experiment and this 12 months George Petrou felt it could be good to return to certainly one of Handel’s main operas. For George, Tamerlano stands above every part that Handel did and its dramatic method goes past the 18th century, wanting ahead to operatic developments within the nineteenth century. The massive dramatic scene on the finish of Act Three, when Bajazet dies on stage in entrance of the opposite protagonists, doesn’t recur in Handel’s later operas, and each the dramatic method and sound-world sit up for Romantic opera. For George, that is genius at its finest, everlasting and never restricted to 1 period. And for this years opera, not solely are they returning to Handelian fundamentals however presenting certainly one of his crowning achievements.
Tamerlano has essentially the most recitative of any of Handel’s operas, and within the throne room scene in Act Two, it has the longest sequence of recitative that Handel wrote. In his 2005 recording, George included all of Handel’s recitative, however the composer himself did abridgements. They intend to carry out the total opera on the pageant, with maybe only a few cuts inside arias however frankly George feels that there’s nothing to chop. On this opera, every part serves a goal, creating the drama additional, although had admits that in different of Handel’s operas there are often cuts attainable.
Massive-scale opera seria can stay a problem for contemporary audiences (George’s recording has considerably over three hours of music), however he feels that an viewers can observe the drama if the director does their job. The pageant two earlier Handel operas, Giuilio Cesare and Semele, have been directed by George himself, since then he has invited colleagues who he has labored with earlier than. Final 12 months’s pasticcio was directed by Laurence Dale and this 12 months Tamerlano can be directed by Rosetta Cucchi. Considerably, maybe, each are musicians; Laurence Dale had a big profession as a tenor earlier than transferring into directing while Rosetta Cucchi, creative director of the Wexford Pageant, is an accompanist. Each deliver a musician’s method to the staging. For George, it is very important respect the music in any operatic staging. He factors out that it’s the composer who decides the timing, emotion and affekt in a scene by way of the music and we’ve to respect this. In any case, when you do not prefer it, you do not have to do it, in any other case the director finally ends up getting concerned in what’s the composer’s job in a piece.
He admits that such sympathetic stagings usually are not simple to do and require a variety of information. He feels that some administrators rely an excessive amount of on intuition and that the dramaturgy of their productions comes from the libretto fairly than the music. In Göttingen, as creative director and conductor of the opera, George has a job to play in these determination, and this 12 months he’s working with one thing that he was labored with earlier than as he and Rosetta Cucchi collaborated on a staging of Scarlatti’s Griselda (on the Pageant della Valle d’Itria Martina Franca, and accessible on DVD), so he feels that Tamerlano is in good fingers.
Handel’s Solomon is one other superb work and the subject, dealing because it does with a fantastic king, is inspiring. However then he provides, what music of Handel’s will not be nice and he feels blessed to be a part of the pageant, including that with Handel you may by no means go incorrect. George feedback that even the weakest of Handel’s operas is a masterpiece. Ann Hallenberg is, for George, one of many nice women of Handel singing and together with her method to her Handel roles she has created an entire faculty of Handelian bel canto. The gala will function arias by Handel to showcase her repertoire, and George has chosen concertos by Vivaldi as a distinction to those and to showcase the musicians in the absolute best method.
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| FestspielOrchester Göttingen (Photograph: Theodoro da Silva) |
The rest of the occasions within the pageant are meant to offer range and context, with a variety of the music regarding Handel to create a pleasant counterpoint to the three foremost pageant occasions, and George takes nice satisfaction within the calibre of the artists they invite. The pageant will not be fastened however because the world entails, so does the pageant and its occasions. George desires to incorporate leading edge Handel, whether or not new musicological discoveries or creative targets. Within the Nineties and 2000s, the main focus was on traditionally knowledgeable performances, however George feels that now they’ll use the traditionally knowledgeable considering that they realized to specific one thing up to date. Studying about authenticity was a course of that’s nonetheless happening. This isn’t the 18th century, we’re totally different, we don’t eat the identical method nor will we snicker on the similar issues. What George desires to do is use these artistic endeavors to create fashionable tradition by the ideas of the previous, to make use of their information of those 18th century works to specific at the moment’s world.
With no recordings to confer with, we’ve to make an informed guess and we principally comply inside a set framework. However there are invaluable inquiries to be requested. Is it essential to make it sound like Handel anticipated, and would he like what we do? In any case, the notion of velocity within the 18th century is totally different to at the moment while the sense of quantity, of loudness, may be very totally different, in order that this stuff usually are not comparable.
Wanting forward, there are different pasticcos created by Handel himself, reminiscent of Giove in Argo, that characterize a risk because the pageant opera. George feels that some years they may give themselves the luxurious of with the ability to take a break and current one thing unknown or dangerous. And the broader repertoire on the pageant doesn’t at all times must depend on Handel, there may be music that pertains to Handel, discovering hyperlinks between Handel, his contemporaries and at the moment. George’s quest is to method three centuries of music from Handel by to at the moment.
Full particulars from the pageant’s web site.
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- Residence
