Francesco Cavalli: Il Giasone

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Francesco Cavalli: Il Giasone
Musical drama in a prologue and three acts
Created at the San Cassiano Theater on January 5, 1649
Version edited by Leonardo García Alarcòn

Director: Serena Sinagaglia
Sets and costumes: Ezio Toffolutti
Lights: Ezio Toffolutti and Simon Trottet

Giasone: Valer Sabadus
Medea: Kristina Hammarström
Isifile: Kristina Mkhitaryan
Ercole: Alexander Milev
Besso: Günes Gürle
Egeo: Raúl Giménez
Orestes/Giove: Willard White
Demo/Volano: Migran Agadzhanyan
Delfa/Eolo: Dominique Visse
Alinda: Mariana Flores
Sole: Kristina Mkhitaryan
Amore: Mary Feminear

Cappella Mediterranea
Direction musical: Leonardo García Alarcòn

In 1649, Francesco Cavalli, who was then the most important opera composer in Venice, transformed the Greek myth of Jason and Medea into an opera for the libertine and hedonistic city of Venice, and peppered it with comic scenes, heart-rending laments, scenes of madness or sleep, characters in disguise.

Full of magnificent music, Il Giasone was the most performed Italian opera of its century, with 18 performances in Venice and 24 productions recorded up to 1681: a must!

The reading developed by Serena Sinigaglia and Leonardo García Alarcòn consecrates less the weakness of men than the triumph of women. The male is not only governed by his desires, reduced to the rank of sexual object, when he is not in currency her charms; he also fades before the determination, the courage – not to say the superiority – of the fair sex. While the commentators of Il Giasone tend to focus on its antihero, the show on the bill at the Grand Théâtre de Geneva reveals its true heroine, not Medea, but Hypsipyle, the queen of Lemnos, whose stature and complexity that makes her the most famous protagonist is revealed by Kristina Mkhitaryan – remember this name, because she is the other revelation of the day – interesting part of the work.

While its libretto has had five consecutive editions, the score of Cavalli's tenth opera, like that of his other dramas, has not had this luck, a shortcoming that still remains today one of the main obstacles to their dissemination and which should be overcome by the complete edition undertaken by Bärenreiter. In the meantime, the music of Il Giasone has come down to us in nine manuscripts, which omit certain instrumental parts and therefore require restoration work. The edition established by Leonardo García Alarcòn brings back Il Giasone, once exhumed in its almost entirety by René Jacobs, in more realistic proportions even if it still lasts three hours (excluding intermission), and fills the gaps by drawing in particular on the work of the Venetian (quote from Eliogabalo...) The cuts of the Argentinian conductor are quite skillful so as not to compromise the readability of the action and one should certainly not attribute to them certain breaks in tone or a lack of unity, because they are inherent in the very writing of Il Giasone which, observes Ellen Rosand, unites "situations as comical as they are poignant as possible, sometimes in immediate juxtaposition".