This review by Thomas Busse was published in San Francisco Classical Voice on April 15, 2008.
The crack early-music ensemble Magnificat attempted the difficult challenge of performing a Baroque comic opera in concert over the weekend. The form is unlike serious opera or slighter genres such as intermezzos or serenatas, which readily lend themselves to unstaged presentation. Comic opera, with its typically recitative-heavy, slighter music, depends on stage action, comic timing, and the conveyance of complicated and farcical plots, much of which gets lost by singers in dress clothes standing in place.
I am happy to report that Magnificat, under Warren Stewart’s direction, pulled off the challenge magnificently on Saturday in Berkeley’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.
The evening’s dusted-off museum piece was Alessandro Stradella’s penultimate stage work, Il Trespolo Tutore, a charming work from 1679, for which modern performing material was prepared by Michael Burden for performance at New College, Oxford, in 2004, ...
“Monday or Tuesday, I will put on stage the third opera, also mine, which is for amusement, because it is a comic opera, but most beautiful, and it is called Il Trespolo; and because here they delight in comic things, I believe it will be an infallible hit.”
So Alessandro Stradella described his opera Il Tespolo Tutore in a letter to one of his patrons in 1679 before performances at the Teatro Falcone in Genoa. Featuring the bumbling character Trespolo from the popular stories of Ricciardi, Stradella’s opera is indeed “ridicola” bordering on slapstick and replete with vulgar language, cross dressing, and sexual innuendo - as popular in the early days of comic opera as today.
The main character, and the butt of endless jokes, is the foolish tutor Trespolo, a character modelled on the commedia figure of Il Dottore. “Trespolo” is not a real name – it’s rough meaning is “tripod” ...
Brazilian counter tenor José Lemos will make his Magnificat debut in our upcoming performances of Stradella's comic opera Il Trespolo tutore.
Lemos is the First Prize winner and the Audience Prize winner of the 2003 International Baroque Singing Competition of Chimay, Belgium. Having recently completed his Masters Degree at the New England Conservatory in Boston, he has appeared in opera roles and in concert with companies such as Boston Baroque, Boston Cecilia, Harvard Early Music Society, Les Parlement de Musique, Piccolo Spoleto Festival Early Music Series, and the Aldeburgh Snape Proms in England.
In the summer of 2003 he made his USA opera debut at The Tanglewood Music Festival in Robert Zuidam's Rage D'Amours, and returned for their 2004 production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream as Oberon. He has also joined the Tanglewood Music Center in the Los Angeles premiere of the opera Ainadamar by composer Osvaldo Golijov at the new ...
The following Synopsis was prepared by Dr. Michael Burden of New College Oxford and is reposted here with permission of the author.
The story centres on Signor Trespolo's attempts to find a husband for his ward, Artemisia; if she is satisfied, then they will both inherit money under her father's will.
At the beginning of Act I, Simona is trying to get Despina to agree to a marriage with Trespolo, saying that a husband is like medicine, but Despina says that Trespolo is like a hairy bear, and has no brain. Simona welcomes Nino, who has been away, business unspecified. He inquires the reason for the argument, and, when told that Despina does not want to get married, says that that is only natural, since she is young. Nino then mentions his brother Ciro, who has been driven crazy by love. He sends Simona away with the comment that he will find ...
by Samuel Dwinell
January of 1679 saw the premiere of Alessandro Stradella's Il Trespolo tutore in the Teatro Falcone in Genoa, a city well suited to the plot of this opera; as Stradella himself noted, the Genoese had a penchant for 'comic things'. By the time he wrote Trespolo, the recent genre of Italian comic opera was becoming well established, and Stradella had already written comic prologues and intermezzos for the Teatro Tordinona. However, with this opera, Stradella invented the operatic buffo bass (something which would become a defining characteristic of later comic opera), and placed him in the title role as Trespolo, the foolish guardian.
The libretto is Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi's reworking of a popular comic play by Giovanni Battista Ricciardi. With just the same emphasis on intrigue, misunderstandings, and farce as Villifranchi's adaptation, Ricciardi's play contains a light comedy, often bordering on slap-stick in a language which resembles the everyday, ...
Magnificat is pleased to announce our 16th Season of concerts exploring the rich and varied repertoire of the Seventeenth Century. This season offers tremendous variety in genres and national styles with an opera and a program of cantatas and instrumental music from Italy; several petit motets from France, and a liturgical reconstruction from northern Germany.
The season opens on the weekend of October 26-28 with a program that will recreate the musical festivities surrounding the 1607 re-dedication of St. Gertrude’s chapel in Hamburg (pictured at right). Joined by The Whole Noyse and The Sex Chordæ Consort of Viols, Magnificat will perform music of Hieronymus Prætorius, Jakob Handl, and others in this program that weaves polychoral motets, traditional chant, and Lutheran chorales in a rich sonic tapestry. We are pleased to welcome back German baritone Martin Hummel, who will act as celebrant and sing in several of the motets.
The re-dedication service was ...
Just a few days after concluding our 2006-2007 season, Magnificat was honored to be presented by the Society for Seventeenth Century Music as part of their annual conference. The concert was a repeat of our subscription series program that featured music of Chiara Margharita Cozzolani in a reconstruction of an Easter Vespers liturgy. The musicians performing were (left to right in the photo) Catherine Webster, Margaret Bragle, Jennifer Ellis, Kristen Dubenion Smith, John Dornenburg, Katherine Heater, Warren Stewart, Elizabeth Anker, David Tayler, Andrea Fullington, Suzanne Elder Wallace, and Jennifer Paulino.
The concert took place in the beautiful Patricia George Decio Theatre in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on the Notre Dame campus. The recently built concert hall boasts extraordinarily clear acoustics and the stage crew were exemplary - making us all feel like rock stars. A small but remarkable audience, made up almost entirely of scholars specializing in seventeenth century music, ...
Some years after Stradella’s murder, Pierre Bourdelot and Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot included an account of the event in their Histoire de la Musique. Published in Paris in 1715, theirs was the first history of music in French and therefore it attracted quite a bit of attention, with the result that news of the composer –‘the most excellent musician in all of Italy around the year 1670’– was circulated throughout Europe.
However, their fascinating tale of romance, wherein Stradella ran off with the mistress of a Venetian nobleman, who then had the lovers pursued from one city to another by a band of assassins, was not all true. Certainly false was the scene where the thugs were restrained from carrying out the murder because of the beauty of Stradella’s music, obliging the Venetian to hire other assassins to carry out the deed. Since the real facts were not generally known, and the fabricated ...
