REVIEWS: CLASSICAL – Andromeda Liberata Barbican London

The Independent – United Kingdom
Dec 16, 2004

Roderic Dunnett

FANS OF Vivaldi’s “Gloria” and The Four Seasons are waking up to the
fact that he was as prolific a composer of operas as Handel. In this,
they’re not far behind the performers: European ensembles – perhaps
judiciously – have been equally slow to reacquaint themselves with
the Venetian’s operas.

Still, 18th-century scholars – HC Robbins Landon and Jonathan
Keates among them – have always realised the potential riches to be
unearthed, as have the Italians since the composer Gian Francesco
Malipiero restored Vivaldi and other Italian Baroque masters in
the 1920s. But recently the sizzling Savaria Baroque Ensemble from
Hungary only produced a lacklustre revival of Vivaldi’s Il Tigrane
(Armenian shenanigans from Nero’s time) at St James’s in Piccadilly.

Andrea Marcon’s Venice Baroque Orchestra, which brought Vivaldi’s
Andromeda Liberata (whose authorship is partly disputed) to the
Barbican, is as deft if not as refined a group but here managed a much
better orchestral showing. There was much to admire in the searing
strings, the desirable lute playing and some fine oboes and horns. The
punters clearly adored it, and thronged to pay pounds 22 for the CD.

You’d think it was Handel. It wasn’t. Ultimately, Venice Baroque’s
over- forceful display proved scarcely better than the (that day)
subfusc Hungarians. Why? Because Marcon thundered through most of it
like a bull in a china shop. Would Vivaldi really have wanted Czech
soprano Katerina Beranova to roar the words “A mother in anguish,
I sighed”? Or as wonderful a Yugoslav mezzo as Marijana Mijanovic
to deliver “Ruscelletti limpidetti” – “Murmuring streamlets” – like
Niagara Falls in spate?

Any fault must lie with the Swiss-trained conductor, whose delivery
lacks the finesse he brings to scholarship and ensemble-coordinating:
Croatian countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic overcame Perseus’s initial
Romanesque stolidity to shine in “Sovvente il sole”; Beranova thundered
admirably in her own genuinely fiery arias; and Enrico Onofri brought
his apt Italian tenor to Daliso’s cheerful “Cupid’s dart” ditty.

The evening’s only revelation was the recently unchained Andromeda,
the Leipzig-trained Simone Kermes. Here at last was the loveliness,
the sensitivity, the rage and some gorgeous high notes in “Un occhio
amabile”, “Mi piace e mi diletta” and “Che e fenice”, which highlights
the opera’s links to Venice.

Lastly, the lavatories. The Barbican started the rot, and now the
new Covent Garden and – worse still – the new ENO offer only warm
water in their washrooms. “It has something to do with the way they’re
plumbed,” ventured Sir John Tusa, the Barbican’s general director, when
taxed with the question over the bar. Talk about a tepid truism. One
expects greater consideration for ticket-buying punters from our
finest artistic institutions. Replumb, please, all three.