Review of The Academy of Ancient Music: ‘Transformation’: Charpentier, Actéon. Rameau, Pygmalion.
In the first presentation of their new season (2024-25), under the title ‘Transformation’, the Academy of Ancient Music with Director Laurence Cummings presented concert performances of two short baroque operas, Charpentier’s Actéon and Rameau’s Pygmalion.
The stories of both are derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a collection of myths united in their accounts of worldly change and transformation of various kinds. Ovid’s work as a whole is itself a demonstration of such instability, constantly diverging from the business in hand and merging one narrative into another in the process.
Metamorphoses was a huge influence on subsequent literature. For example, the story with which AAM began the first of its two flawless performances is one to which Shakespeare alludes in the opening lines of Twelfth Night.
The lovelorn and self-centred Orsino in that play ludicrously compares himself to Ovid’s Acteon, the hunter transformed into a stag by an irate Diana (goddess of hunting) as the punishment she exacts for his unwitting espial of her bathing naked before he is then torn to pieces by his own dogs.
Orsino says: ‘O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first that instant was I turned into a hart, and my desires, like fell and cruel hounds e’er since pursue me.’
Mythology of this kind was a way in which archetypal situations were represented, allowing the exploration of the dual nature of human beings–hence the many myths which deal with transformation, men and women transformed into gods and goddesses or, as in the story of Acteon here, being transformed (or partly transformed) into non-human creatures.
Rameau’s Pygmalion, the second of the two works we heard on Tuesday evening, is a mid-eighteenth century version of another of Ovid’s stories, a creation myth about the celibate artist Pygmalion who falls in love with his own sculpture of an ideal woman, subsequently brought to life for him by Aphrodite.
Where Diana is cruel to Acteon, Pygmalion is rewarded by Aphrodite who demonstrates (to borrow words from Shakespeare’s Romeo) that ‘stony limits cannot hold love out.’ Shakespeare himself works with Ovid’s Pygmalion myth where Paulina brings to life the ‘stone’ image of the supposed-dead Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.
Both operas we heard relate not only to the strength of human emotions but also to the power of events over which we have no control. As Shakespeare’s Player King in Hamlet puts it: ‘Our wills and fates do so contrary run, / That our devices still are overthrown; / Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.’
Just as Shakespeare’s Orsino creates for himself in Olivia an unreal image, Acteon is similarly attracted to the ideal world of Diana and her bathing nymphs. And Pygmalion’s vow of celibacy is countered by Cupid’s ploy to afflict him with desire for the creation of his very own hands.
Both stories made a strong appeal in the period which was soon to follow these two operas; the conceit of creature and creator would become a very prominent topic for artists and writers in Romanticism.
In a preliminary talk the Director of AAM, Laurence Cummings, Bojan Čičić (First violin) and Rachel Brown (flautist) discussed the choice of programme.
Bojan remarked that at the beginning of his career in music Charpentier’s Actéon was his first introduction to opera. Charpentier, he said, along with composers like Handel, was a figure who knew how to create an atmosphere.
Rachel Brown was high in her praise of Rameau with his original scoring and rich transformational music, while Cummings spoke of how music in general had a special power to be transformative. In fact he revealed this admirably in the subsequent performance by transforming his role as standing conductor at the keyboard to one almost of dancing master, demonstrably allowing the music to inhabit every part of his being as he was carried along with it. As he’d mentioned in the talk there is a lot of dance in all French opera.
In these two relatively short compositions, the elegance and grace of French Baroque represented, for the three speakers, a kind of step back from the more upfront presence of Italian opera.
AAM’s inaugural concert of the season was graced by the outstanding vocals of Anna Dennis (soprano) in the principal roles of Diana (Actéon) and the Statue (Pygmalion) respectively, and of Thomas Walker (tenor) as Acteon and Pygmalion.
Rachel Redmond (soprano) and Katie Bray (mezzo-soprano) lent their beautiful voices to their several roles in both operas, and the concert as a whole employed a delightful small chorus and used an effective projection of the librettos to obviate the hopeless situation in concert halls where ‘lights out’ makes it impossible to follow a written text.
AAM was, as ever, in a class of its own, and the sequence of dance measures it was able to perform, as the Graces instruct the Statue in the arts, was a gift to the ensemble to exhibit for Tuesday evening’s sold-out audience just how outstanding it can be.
JOHN GILROY
