Astonishing, relentlessly pleasurable rediscovery – tantric opera: Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato reviewed

I don’t say this lightly, but after 20 years of opera-going, Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato might just be the most baffling opera I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen Stockhausen’s Licht.

It starts with 27 named roles and originally featured no fewer than ten castrati among its cross-dressing, all-male cast. This operatic game of Twister was premièred in Rome in 1642, where it originally played out over seven scintillating hours and nearly 3,000 verses of poetry written, incidentally, by the man who would go on to become Pope Clement IX.

A plot based on Ariosto’s sorcerers-and-Saracens epic Orlando Furioso brings together every character you’ve heard of (and lots that you haven’t) including knights Orlando and Ruggiero, seductress Angelica and abandoned fiancée Bradamante, and lets them all loose in the wizard Atlante’s magical labyrinth — a baroque Hotel California where shape-shifting comes as standard and partner-swapping is enthusiastically encouraged. Try and follow the tangle at your peril.

The thing is, the music is astonishing — all the more so because, until a few months ago, no one had heard a note of it for nearly 400 years. Rossi himself, if not exactly a household name, has a pretty good foothold in the repertoire thanks to his second opera Orfeo (staged by the Royal Opera in 2015) which has a quiet, cultish sort of status among the kind of enthusiasts who share obscure opera recommendations instead of racing tips. But Rossi’s first opera has long been listed as ‘lost’ in catalogues, just another musical might-have-been.

Then Argentinian conductor Leonardo Garcia Alarcon tracked it down to the Vatican Library, cut it down to a more manageable size and staged it for the first time since its première in Dijon in December — a rare good-news story in the middle of a pandemic.