René Jacobs takes a hatchet to Vivaldi with Il Giustino — review

René Jacobs has taken a hatchet to Vivaldi. From more than five hours of rambling content, he has made a taut three, mostly by trimming away excess arias but also by adding other instrumental music — some of it from the painfully familiar Four Seasons — to aid the dramatic flow.

Il Giustino is the first Vivaldi opera ever performed at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden, part of a small baroque festival born to fill the time when Daniel Barenboim was on tour with his Staatskapelle orchestra. Jacobs was on top form and deservedly won a standing ovation at the end of Sunday’s opening night. Vivaldi’s operas are often slighted for their poor dramaturgy. Jacobs has no compunctions about fixing their structural weaknesses, and the result is an effervescent evening where one hit follows the next, with fine singing centre stage.

The plot is the usual tangle of jealous lovers, impetuous rulers, mistaken identity and cross-dressing — shepherd Giustino turns out to be the long-lost brother of Vitaliano, the bad guy who turns into a good guy just in time for the final chorus. You’d be forgiven for spending half the evening wondering if this is a woman playing a man dressed as a woman, or a woman playing a man dressed as . . . whatever. The main thing is that there is excellent singing, from Christophe Dumaux’s robust, tender performance in the title role and Kateryna Kasper’s fiery, formidable Arianna to Raffaele Pe’s camp good guy Anastasio and Siyabonga Maqungo’s loveable bad guy, Vitaliano — his vocal fireworks shaped with wonderful musical intelligence and phrased with melting beauty.

Jacobs carries the singers in the palms of his hands, breathing with them, keeping tempi consummately singable and giving the score organic shape. It is a pity, then, that Barbora Horáková’s production is such a muddle. Eva-Maria Van Acker’s costumes are a mishmash of baroque bustles with modern hoodies and sports shoes, Thilo Ullrich’s sets a clever glimpse into the inner workings of baroque stage mechanics. Horáková introduces an “audience” of children who become involved in the action. This is yet another device in a jumble of incoherent slapstick.

Where Vivaldi’s arias offer a chance to explore the most elemental of human emotions, Horáková opts for Brechtian deconstruction and a wearying catalogue of we-know-we-are-in-the-theatre statements. Her production saps the opera of all sincerity, without lending any overarching substance. Berlin can and should do better.

★★★☆☆

To December 6, staatsoper-berlin.de