“Ercole sul Termodonte” by Alan Curtis

I watched Vivaldi’s “Ercole sul Termodonte” conducted by Alan Curtis. His orchestra, Il Complesso Barocco played the orchestration.

This stage production was filmed in 2007, but it looked like made in 80’s or 90’s because the fuzzy picture quality of the video and both make-up and costumes styles.

This opera is about the battle of the sexes between the Greek soldiers leading by Heracles and the rebel Amazon female warriors leading by the Amazon queen. The Amazon queen hates men and Heracles believes the Amazon queen has to be conquered. So Heracles invades the Amazon territory for battle but instead some of the Greek soldiers and the female warriors started to fall in love. Basically in the end, love conquers all and they make peace with each other.

 The stage direction of this production is both interesting and distracting. The interesting part is that Heracles who comes from the complete male dominate macho Greek society got shocked and outraged when he saw the giant statues of severed male genitals in Amazon. The distracting part is that literary, he’s completely naked in the first three quarter of the production. And most of the singers and dancers had skimpy outfits. The one side, it’s the battle and attraction of the sexuality, and the same token, it’s old cheep semi-pornography. 

This production for the opera also had to be reconstructed from the scratch, as it was not discovered as one complete piece. Their version is much shorter and less complicated than the CD recording of the same opera orchestrated by Europe Galante conducted by Fabio Biondi staring Rolando Villazon in 2010. The basic story line of these productions is the same, but the details are very different from each other.

Musically, Fabio Biondi’s “Ercole” is 20 times better quality than this production. It had both the world top class orchestration and the singers who were all simply just awesome.

In this production, the singers fall into the category of either good, good enough, not good and no great. As singing goes, I liked soprano, Marina Bartoli better of all. Her voice was beautiful and expressive. She was also pretty and she should get paid extra for wearing such skimpy outfit. Randall Scotting was handsome as well and they made very good-looking on-stage couple. His voice was fuller and stronger than when he sung Caesar in “Giulio Caesar” at Fort Worth Opera Festival. He has beautiful voice and good singing techniques but this is also felt at the festival, he’s lacking emotional expression.

The same things can be said about the rest of the singers. They were good enough except the two tenors who didn’t have much voice to speak of.

Alan Curtis’ orchestration is refined but lacking passion.  This is the first time I got bored listening to Vivaldi. Vivaldi without sparkling passion is not Vivaldi.