Cavalli - La Calisto, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées (TCE), Paris

Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, Wednesday May 6 2026

Conductor: Sébastien Daucé. Production: Jetske Mijnssen. Sets: Julia Katharina Berndt/ Choreography: Dustin Klein. Costumes: Hannah Clark. Lighting: Matthew Richardson. Calisto: Lauranne Oliva. Endimione: Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian. Giove/Giove-Diana: Milan Siljanov. Giunone/Eternita: Anna Bonitatibus. Diana: Sun-Ly Pierce. Linfea: Zachary Wilder. Natura/Pane/Furia: Petr Nekoranec. Mercurio: Dominic Sedgwick. Destino/Satirino/Furia: Paul Figuier. Silvano/Furia: José Coca Loza. Ensemble Correspondances.

Photos: Monika Ritterhaus, Laurent Guizard

Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen’s production of Cavalli’s La Calisto, a work I last saw over thirty years ago (staged by Herbert Wernicke in Brussels), premiered last summer in Aix and has travelled to two or three French regional houses before arriving at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées - another example of the vitality and variety, against all odds, of opera in France’s regions.

Mijnssen’s staging updates the action: par for the course, these days, you might say. Only she updates it, unusually, not to the present day, or the 50s and 60s so dear to many of her colleagues, but to the late eighteenth century. She strips out the mythology and plays it as a tale of aristocratic libertinage, an elaborately polite comedy of manners, all deep bowing and curtseys and balletic scraping. Think, therefore, of Watteau’s paintings, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Giorgio Strehler’s fabled production of Le Nozze, to which at times this staging seems to pay deliberate homage, thereby hinting at intriguing parallels between Cavalli’s mythological plot and Beaumarchais’ folle journée.

As, in interview around the time of the Aix premiere, she talks about the freedom and open eroticism of the Venetian theatre at the time of Cavalli, why she took this approach isn’t clear. Perhaps she preferred to avoid falling into the obvious traps of outrageous camp or vulgar farce, the better to focus on how the boredom of aristocratic idleness may have led people to seek distractions in games of seduction: dalliance as a kind of hobby.

She uses a single set: an antechamber, plainly panelled (apart from some timid rococo mouldings); a place, therefore, where people constantly cross paths, with a few chairs, two marble fireplaces, sconces and plenty of doors. There is, at the rear, a cylindrical, similarly panelled rotunda, which rotates to reveal an open space serving various useful purposes: it houses a funeral during the prologue, a dining room, a sort of altar thick with candles, a lowered chandelier lit by liveried lackeys, a green four-poster bed representing the grotto where Giove plans to tryst with Calisto.

Though you might expect a contemporary production to tackle the now questionable aspects of the plot with some force, Mijnssen’s doesn’t. She plays it fairly straight - if the term may be used in this gender-blurring context. (For an English-language plot summary see here; Wikipedia is weirdly unhelpful, saying only that ‘The story is based on the myth of Callisto from Ovid's Metamorphoses’). The production is as beautifully, delicately directed as it is costumed; the humour is gently but effectively handled. The only directorial aberrations are that initial funeral scene, over Calisto’s coffin - making the rest of the opera a flashback; and the startling (and puzzling, as the gods were supposedly immortal) twist kept for the end: Calisto, now sumptuously arrayed for her apotheosis in a stunning, black robe à paniers à la française spangled with sparkling stones, and a high white wig, worthy of a Marschallin, stabs Giove to death: revenge at last for the attentions he forced on her.

The basically single set and uniformly decorous - and decorative - treatment of the action involve risk. Some people find Cavalli’s music too much of a muchness: ‘It all sounds the same,’ said one of my small party, who left after the first 90 minutes. And for this production, conductor Sébastien Daucé chose to expand Cavalli's score considerably, not only in terms of instrumentation (it’s known that at the first performances there were only six musicians; Daucé uses thirty-odd) but also in length: he has inserted passages from other works by by Cavalli and some of his contemporaries, thinking, so I read, La Calisto needed some stately dance interludes (performed by the singers). It therefore runs to three hours of, to my ear, gorgeous music. While what we hear - a beautifully-woven, dusky tapestry of rippling sound, highlighted with soft old trumpets, gently thudding drums and the odd sparkle of a chime - is unmistakably played on ‘historic’ instruments, it can presumably be nothing like what people witnessed in Venice in 1651. (For those who’d like to judge for themselves, a recording with the Aix cast has been available online since April, and will be issued on CDs on May 15).

In Paris, our cast was mostly of young singers, some of whom I had never heard of before. The one key exception was the seasoned ‘baroque’ mezzo Anna Bonitatibus, and though it isn’t necessarily logical in cast-list terms, I’ll pay tribute to her experience and achievement by beginning with her. I haven’t seen her often since her 2008 Sesto in Brussels, where she very nearly stole the show, even though Zazzo was singing Cesare. She put in a marvellous performance as Giunone (and Eternita), radiating firm authority, joy or fury with striking naturalness, physically and vocally. Her ‘Moglie mie sconsolate’, the great tragic set-piece in the third act, was probably the highlight of the whole evening, even recalling to me how Arleen Auger similarly reduced Parisians to silence with ‘Ah! Mio cor’ in Alcina all those years ago.

But some of the singers were new to me.

Still in her twenties, Lauranne Oliva (Calisto), won first prize in the Paris Opera Competition in 2023 and was the ‘Revelation’ of France’s 'Victoires de la Musique Classique' the following year. She has a sparkling, silvery voice, perhaps a little bit lightweight for the house, especially when her rapid ‘coloratura’ passages (I imagine the term is, with regard to Cavalli, anachronistic, but you get the idea) were pitted against Daucé’s comfortably-upholstered orchestra.

Also new and intriguing to me, though probably less so to American readers, was mezzo Sun-Ly Pierce, singing Diana. On Parterre Box as recently as March this year, Michael Antonio told us that, ‘Fresh from returning as Rosa Saks in the highly successful The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay at the Met a few weeks ago, mezzo Sun-Ly Pierce dazzled in her LAO debut as Nefertiti, Akhnaten’s wife.’ She pretty much dazzled me as Diana too: accomplished, impressive, and I hope I may soon hear her again.

The men in the cast were in the main evenly-matched - indeed, supposing that in Cavalli’s day notions of Fach were less firmly entrenched than today, it wasn’t all that easy to tell who was a tenor and who a baritone. New to me, again, Dominic Sedgwick, playing Giove’s constant companion and confidant, Mercurio, is a singularly elegant English baritone, along Montague Rendall lines. Petr Nekoranec (tenor, singing Pane as well as the lesser roles of Natura and Furia) is, so I read, a frequent soloist at Prague’s National Theatre, and as well as thinking that, with his strong, almost hard-edged sound, he could be an effective haute contre for some of the exacting roles Rameau composed for Jelyotte, he might also prove to be an effective Janacek tenor, if these two may be considered compatible.

The more familiar Zachary Wilder (dragged up, bewigged and rouged for the Arnalta-type comic role of Linfea) sang elegantly, as usual, and handled the comedy impeccably, but projected less forcibly into the house.

The leading role of Giove (and Giove disguised as Diana) was taken by Milan Siljanov, whom I’d seen just once before, last year, as the Forester in The Cunning Little Vixen. I wrote then that he ‘has an interesting, warm, velvety bass-baritone voice…’ as deep, I might now add, as he is tall and gangling, cutting a fine comic figure (and oddly recalling his fellow-womaniser, former French president Jacque Chirac) in his brocade coat and silk stockings, but even more so dressed as Diana.

I first saw the excellent Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian in Theodora only five years ago, noting his ‘unusually warm, dark, round timbre that even, at times, brought Dame Janet Baker to mind, engaging stage presence and obvious commitment.’ I saw him again as Nireno in a 2022 Giulio Cesare, by now plainly an emerging star, and as Demetrio in a 2024 concert version of Händel’s Berenice, after which I wrote that his furious ‘Su, Megera, Tisifone, Aletto !’ was one of the evening's highlights, 'breathtaking in its expressive virtuosity and utterly moving.' He is now, as far as I’m concerned, and without even, as far as I’m aware, standing on his hands or travelling with his own frocks, established as one of the best countertenors around, one whose name I’m actually glad to find in a cast list. He played and sang a wholly engaging Endimione, calling to mind Watteau’s rosy-cheeked Mezzetin, now in New York.

And finally, Paul Figuier and José Coca Loza provided more-than-adequate support in a variety of supporting roles.

As I wrote above, Jetske Mijnssen’s softly-lit, suavely-costumed and unfailingly well-mannered translation of La Calisto to a courtly eighteenth century, all in a single set, involved risks. After the Aix performances last summer, some critics complained of being bored. But I certainly wasn’t. Though you might say Mijnssen’s approach robbed us of the rambunctious naughtiness we might expect from a Venetian comedy of the period, or indeed of a more obvious, contemporary probing of sexual and marital mores, or, again, of the questions of gender the plot has the potential to raise, it offers an opportunity to take a quieter, calmer look at these things and make up our own minds, rather than having conclusions hammered into our heads. And both visually and musically, it was quite a magnificent evening.

The following clip is from a different run:

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.