Orontea review – this subversive opera is good, dirty fun

First performed in 1656, Antonio Cesti’s Orontea was immensely popular in its day. Like much of the composer’s music, however, it languished in obscurity for centuries, and the baroque revival hasn’t accorded it the same status as the operas of Monteverdi and Cavalli. La Nuova Musica’s concert performance under its director, David Bates – its first UK outing for decades – revealed it be a tremendous entertainment, though it has its flaws.

A subversive, erotic comedy, it deals with the fictional Egyptian queen Orontea (Anna Stéphany), who falls for a handsome refugee painter, Alidoro (Jonathan McGovern), only to find she has most of the women in her court as rivals. Caught up in the resulting maelstrom are her moralistic councillor, Creonte (Timothy Dickinson), and the slave girl Giacinta (Anat Edri), whose appearance disguised as a man inflames Alidoro’s sexually voracious mother, Aristea (tenor Sam Furness, glorious in drag).

Royalty behaving badly is the opera’s theme, a point Cesti carefully underscores by giving the most sensual and sincere music to the plebeian couple Silandra (Mary Bevan) and Corindo (Michal Czerniawski), who have most to lose when Silandra also falls under Alidoro’s spell. The downside is that the characters are sometimes buried by the mechanics of the plot, while a rushed denouement makes the ending unsatisfactory.

La Nuova Musica, however, did it wonderfully well. Bates’s conducting had superb poise, and the cast was impeccable, with not a weak link anywhere.

Bevan’s and Czerniawski’s ecstatic duets stood out, as did Edward Grint and Christopher Turner as a pair of unsavoury choric commentators, whose remarks punctuate the drama with delicious shafts of irony. The surtitles, pitched somewhere between Carry On film and Restoration bawdry, occasionally went over the top. Good, dirty fun, though, and a real treat.