Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, but there’s still time for one last opera festival. Vache Baroque popped up in 2020 during that weird first release from lockdown, but to be honest, if you were starting a new festival, late August is probably the best part of the calendar to colonise. The big boys (even Glyndebourne) have left the stage, Edinburgh is done and the Proms are the only game in town. And the place to do it would be within easy reach of the capital: in this case, a fold of the Chilterns just off the rural top end of the Metropolitan Line.
Anyway, Vache Baroque seems to have made a name very quickly, and like the more established opera startup at Waterperry, it still has that youthful, hands-on energy: let’s do the show right here! Yes, it mostly happens in tents, but that’s part of the appeal, and since 2020, Vache has been staging a series of small but well-received baroque spectacles in the grounds of a Jacobean mansion. Spectacle being the operative word with André Campra’s 1699 opera-ballet Le Carnaval de Venise, receiving its UK première some 326 years late.
What took it so long? The answer is in the hyphen. Like many French operas of the period (and like Purcell’s similarly intractable The Fairy Queen) this isn’t opera in the Handel sense, but a masque-like hybrid – a song-and-dance show in which pageantry and ballet sequences are as important as the singing. Ostensibly a romantic drama set during the Venice Carnival, it begins with the entry of the goddess Minerva and concludes with a re-enactment of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In between, spurned lovers plan disproportionately violent revenge against the former objects of their affections – so basically every baroque opera plot ever, then.
The director James Hurley must have concluded early on that the best solution was to embrace the madness. You’re ushered into a big top, where circus artists are integrated into the cast and Campra’s lilting, silvery music – shot through with tambourines and sighing recorders – becomes the pretext for an evening of pure visual fantasy. There are Columbines and Harlequins, and (this being Venice) lots of masks. Singers soar into the air and spiral above the heads of the audience, trilling all the while. Inflatable dice bounce into the crowd and a skein of silk becomes a gondola on a moonlit lagoon. Oh, and a contortionist (Hannah Finn) bends herself double and shoots arrows with her feet, the orchestra having been safely evacuated from the line of fire. You don’t get that at Covent Garden.
It’s not always easy to work out what’s going on, exactly, but that is hardly the point. It looks enchanting, it sounds gorgeous and there’s scarcely a moment when you’re not either astonished by what you’ve just seen, or faintly alarmed at where it might go next. The singing, too, is stylish and juicy. If Julieth Lozano sparkled most brightly as the heroine Isabelle, I rather enjoyed Katie Bray’s torrents of rage as her rival Léonore. Giuseppe Pellingra made a suitably thunderous impact as Plutone in the Act Three Orpheus sequence.
Andris Nelsons is probably the most musical human being that I have ever met
In fact, that whole final mythological pantomime was huge fun, complete with gilded breastplates, swirling robes and off-the-scale swagger as Hurley and his performers dived headfirst into the Big Book of Bonkers Baroque and pulled back, smiling, just the right side of parody. The audience roared and as the cast took their bows the conductor, Jonathan Darbourne, was grabbed by the cast and hoisted shoulder high. It’s that kind of festival, and it was that kind of night.
At the Proms, Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig played a determinedly non-blockbuster programme. Arvo Part’s well-worn Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten opened with a moment of high daring – string playing so astonishingly soft that it hardly moved the air. Then Isabelle Faust performed the Dvorak Violin Concerto, and with her creamy vibrato and daredevil technique, she was like a virtuoso from the golden age, tracing bittersweet melodies against the deep-grained darkness of the Leipzig string sound.
Andris Nelsons is probably the most musical human being that I have ever met, but genius has its downside and Nelsons, like Simon Rattle, has a habit of getting lost in the moment. But where Rattle will suddenly pause to explore some orchestral detail, Nelsons drifts off into a kind of reverie. It’s beautiful, but a bit of a handicap in – say – the second and fourth movements of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, where Sibelius stretches his architecture almost to snapping point. Still: the warmth and sweep of the opening movement; the gravity of the Leipzig strings, and the self-effacing eloquence of the woodwind playing! ‘This isn’t an orchestra of soloists, is it?’ observed my companion. No, it wasn’t; and all the greater for it.
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