The Olimpiade: Venice Baroque Orchestra

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The Dijon Opera’s Italian season comes to a close in a manner that fully captures the Baroque spirit: a magnificent voyage through a century of Italian opera.

Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known as Mestastasio, was one of the 18th century’s most celebrated librettists of opera seria. His style and dramaturgical creations – subjects drawn from Greco‐Roman antiquity, conflicts between love and duty, between political ambition and the respect of others, between hate and forgiveness – profoundly marked the history of opera. In contrast to Venitian opera (represented this season by Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea), which mixes genres and deploys complex and tortuous plots, Mestastasio develops a storyline that is simple, clear and unencumbered, in the mould of classic tragedy, according to a constant formal model: alternating recitatives and airs until the ensemble that marks the end of the act. No sooner where his works published (27 in all), than they were adopted throughout Europe (with the notable exception of France) by numerous composers, including Mozart (La clemenza di Tito), and even into the 19th century by Meyerbeer and Mercadante. Olimpiade, for example, a story of forbidden love against the background of the Olympic games in ancient Greece, was set to music by more than sixty composers, amongst whom we find Caldara, Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Jommelli, Mysliveček, Cimarosa and even Donizetti.

The Venice Baroque Orchestra and its conductor Andrea Marcon, experts in the Baroque Italian repertoire, offer us a unique experience by cobbling together an ideal Olimpiade from the scores left by these numerous composers.

Soloists:
    Megacle, Romina Basso
    Aristea, Ruth Rosique
    Argene, Karina Gauvin