Alessandro Scarlatti - Il Primo Omicidio ovvero Caino

Alessandro Scarlatti - Il Primo Omicidio ovvero Caino 

ONP Garnier, Tuesday January 29 2018 Conductor: René Jacobs. Production, sets, costumes and lighting: Romeo Castellucci. Caino: Kristina Hammarström. Abele: Olivia Vermeulen. Eva: Birgitte Christensen. Adamo: Thomas Walker. Voce di Dio: Benno Schachtner. Voce di Lucifero: Robert Gleadow. B’Rock Orchestra. Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine, ONP Children’s Choir.

Wikipedia lists over 60 operas by Alessandro Scarlatti, none of which I've ever come across in a theatre over the past 40 years. Nevertheless, in co-production with Palermo, the Paris Opera decided to stage one of his oratorios: Il Primo Omicidio. The result didn’t confirm the wisdom of the choice. While Händel’s oratorios might make some dramatic sense (though he, too, wrote plenty of operas), Scarlatti's score is more contemplative - I might even say more religious. Jacobs is sometimes criticised for taking liberties for the sake of theatricality but did little to bring it to theatrical life. In his hands, the work came across as professionally crafted and delicately decorative, but not actually thrilling or moving. The few surprises were... few. The French have a useful expression, Un robinet d'eau tiède - a steady trickle of tepid water. It came to my mind as I sat there wishing things might get a bit more exciting.

Among the cast, only Robert Gleadow seemed determined to shake things up bit: dark and diabolically dramatic. Thomas Walker had an interesting, complex timbre and his phrasing and elegance reminded me of Nigel Robson, but in rapid semiquaver work the near-strangeness of his voice turned quite ugly. Birgitte Christensen was a fine, subtle mezzo. The others ranged from adequate to not quite or not at all. Overall this was a performance that might have been more in its place in a church setting, with the singers lined up in front of the orchestra. All the more so because Castellucci’s production functioned more as a backdrop or tableau vivant than an operatic production.

A. Scarlatti

In the first part, the cast sang in front of an impressive light installation: bars and rectangles of light moved mysteriously behind a gauze or translucent screen, like pale, pastel, shimmering Rothkos and Flavins. The singers - the men in the very worst provincial-German-accountant day-clothes and wigs, Eve in a frumpish brown dress - made slow, awkward hieratic gestures. “Not everyone is Bob Wilson,” said my neighbour at the interval. At her entrance, Eve clumsily dropped four apples. Later they would be picked up again, one each, by her, Adam and the two sons. At one point a renaissance polyptych annunciation was lowered, upside-down, its ogival points menacingly recalling a portcullis (an expensive prop, I thought, to be used so briefly). Abel hooked on to it the long pouch of blood he’d been cradling when the sung text evoked the lamb of god, bloodying his shirt, before embracing his brother, bloodying his. The sacrifice, where we learn God prefers meat to veg, was here suggested by a pair of fog cannons carried on stage by the lads.

The second part was, Castellucci oblige, almost completely different. In place of the shimmering, abstract backdrop, we had a naturalistic field for Cain to labour in (or at any rate, to scratch at listlessly), against a starry night sky. Soon, the singers were doubled by identically-dressed and bewigged children, and soon after that they went down and stood in the pit while the children, lip-synching, took over the action, like a nativity play only encompassing the life of Christ instead of just his birth. So it was a child Cain who stoned a child Abel to death, and from then on the kids milled around, some wheeling bikes, to act out the school play, raising Abel up in triumph, sponging the blood off him, eventually crowning him. I don’t know if Castellucci intended us to think, against the starry night, of Le Petit Prince as well as the fairly easy-to-read religious symbols. Perhaps not.

Anyway, I didn’t really engage with it, and the action in both halves seemed somehow separate from the music (all the more so once the singers were in the pit), chuntering on piously but inoffensively, rather than integrating with it. To be honest, while my neighbour found it quite beautiful, I have to say I found it, by the end, quite tedious.

Here, however, Maestro Wenarto breathes some life into Scarlatti.