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BY WALTER SKIBA
Times Correspondent | Friday, May 23, 2008 | (No comments posted.)
Handel's "Messiah" entertains and uplifts audiences across Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana each year at Christmas and Easter.
While you won't encounter great choruses, you will encounter Handel's incomparable ability to fuse melody and text in Chicago Opera Theater's production of his opera "Orlando," running May 28 through June 8 at the HarrisTheater.
The opera will be sung in its original Italian, with English subtitles projected above the stage.
"Orlando" premiered in 1733, nine years before "Messiah." It is one of more than 45 Italian "opera serias" written by Handel.
The purpose of "opera seria" at that time, according to director Justin Way, was to instruct as well as entertain its aristocratic audiences.
As stated in the preface of the original libretto, the story "tends to demonstrate the imperious manner in which love insinuates its impressions into the hearts of persons of all ranks; and likewise how a wise man should be ever ready with his past endeavors to reconduct into the Right way, those who have been misguided from it by the illusion of their passions."
Taken from Ariosto's epic poem "Orlando furioso" (1532), the story tells of Orlando (also known as Rowland), Charlemagne's great leader in the war against the Saracens, who is driven mad by his love for the Saracen princess Angelica, which distracts him from executing his military duties.
"Angelica was raised in a privileged upper-class society," says Kate Mangiameli, who sings the role at COT, "and she has been used to keeping men at arm's length and manipulates Orlando accordingly."
She is attracted to the soldier Medoro because she sees him in an honest and vulnerable state, unlike the inflated images her suitors have presented, and she eventually learns that love really means caring for someone else more than she cares for herself.
When Orlando discovers that Angelica has given her love to another man, he commits acts of death and destruction and reaches the verge of suicide.
"If this is what love does to people," one of the characters reflects, "then what is so good about it?"
Fortunately, the magician Zoroastro, who has been closely monitoring the fortunes of the troubled lovers, restores Orlando's reason, reverses the havoc he had perpetrated and initiates an ending marked by forgiveness and return to the Right way.
The "femme fatale" aspect of the heroine and the morally compromising disposition of the hero bring to mind film noirs from the 1940s and ‘50s like "Double Indemnity," along with more recent films (also set at that time) like "L. A. Confidential" (1997) and "Hollywoodland" (2007).
So, to expand the reach of "Orlando" and bring it closer to today's audiences (as Diane Paulus did in her edgy, marvelous rendition of Mozart's "Don Giovanni"), Way has chosen to update the story to the 1940s.
Operagoers can expect all kinds of suggestions of film noir, Mangiameli says, including the staging of the way her character is killed.
Originally performed by the great castrato Senesino, the role of Orlando will be sung by counter-tenor Tim Mead.
Audiences can expect to hear the "lovely, individual quality" of a voice sounding an octave above the baritone range and sung by a grown man, according to conductor Raymond Leppard, who led the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for several years.
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"Orlando," an opera by G.F. Handel, presented by Chicago Opera Theater
When: Wednesday to June 8
Where: Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St., Chicago
Cost: $35 to $120. Fifty percent discount in most sections for students with ID.
FYI: (312) 704-8414 or www.ChicagoOperaTheater.org or www.HarrisTheaterChicago.org. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and May 31, June 3 and 6 and 3 p.m. June 8.
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