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Telemann’s Comedia dell’“Aria” New York
Katonah (Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, Venetian Theater)
06/29/2025 - & June 27, 28, 2025 (Great Barrington)
Georg Philipp Telemann: Die ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone oder Das herrsch‑süchtige Camer Mägden, TVWV 21:15 – Ino, TWV 20:41
Amanda Forsythe (Ino), Danielle Reutter-Harrah (Vespetta), Christian Immler (Pimpinone), Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière (Harlequin)
Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs (Musical Directors)
Gilbert Blin & Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière (Stage Directors), Melinda Sullivan (Dance Director),
Gilbert Blin & Meriem Bahri (Costume Designers), Kelly Martin (Lighting Designer)
C. Immler, D. Reuter-Harrah (© Taco Ma‑Suaydee)
“I have always aimed at facility. Music should not be an effort. A good composer should able to set public notices to music.”
Georg Philipp Telemann
“Telemann could write an eight-part motet as quickly as I could write a short letter.”
Georg Friedrich Händel
Several decades ago, when Mahler was paired with Bruckner and dissonance was paired with decadence, Georg Philipp Telemann was associated with P.D.Q. Bach, one of the hundreds of German Baroque composers smashed together into a morass of mediocrity.
Thank heavens–and thank groups like the Boston Early Music ensemble–Telemann has now made his name as one of the most interesting composers (simplistically, “humane” against Bach’s “liturgical”), and personally far more riveting than his colleague and mutual admirer the Esteemed Organist Herr Bach.
Where Bach would lock organ, clavier and himself into a chamber (heretofore known as a Bach’s Office), Telemann was businessman, peripatetic traveler, and indefatigable genius, even bar-hopping in Poland to pick up folk‑music. Where Bach’s wives did nothing but give him babies, Telemann’s second wife deserted the matrimonial bed (causing cuckolding giggles throughout Europe), accumulating gambling debts (forcing her husband to write sonatas, operas, program music, concerti for every single day in the last 75 years of his nine decade‑long life).
More to the point–and the point of yesterday’s two‑part Telemann concert at the Caramoor Music Festival–G.P. Telemann could conquer dozens of styles in his long long life from those gooey sonatas for recorder to thousands of Masses, Oratorios and operas.
Yesterday, the concert was unique. Like a news broadcast interrupted by commercials, Telemann’s tragic operas needed amusing intermezzos between the tears. And his comic opera Pimpinone stopped the laughter twice with a two‑section tragic oratorio for solo soprano.
Tragic. In fact, is an understatement. Where most tragic heroines wait for the final scenes to throw themselves off cliffs, towers and parapets, Ino, carrying a baby fathered by that old lubricious scoundrel Jupiter, jumps off a cliff within a few minutes of the monodrama.
A. Forsythe (© Taco Ma-Suaydee)
The story is complicated, save the Ino does recover, transformed into a wave (oh, those tricky Greeks!). More apt are two points. First Amanda Forsythe gave a staggering performance in the title role. Should she essay Lucia’s Mad Scene, she couldn’t have been stronger, more emotional. This was not Callas as Medea, this was Forsythe, galloping up and down the Baroque scale, with scant recitations.
Secondly, her final ten minutes belied–totally belied–Telemann as a mere Baroque composer. This extended coloratura aria explored all the vocal tricks of early 19th Century opera. (Telemann died in 1767, a quarter century before Bellini was born).
Yet this was Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini on steroids. After hearing that aria, this nobody could say that Telemann was “another Baroque composer.”
Ino was the two-part intermezzo for an Italian commedia dell’arte, part of the young-tricky-woman-versus-cantankerous-old man story, a staple from Punch-and-Judy to Pergolesi to Don Pasquale and Figaro. Pimpinone (The Unequal Marriage between Vespetta and Pimpinone or The Domineering Chambermaid) was a three‑part comedy where the comely Vespetta tells the audience she needs marriage to get money. Playing the humble country maiden, she inveigles herself as a servant to “that old fool”, becomes servant–and then, of course the virago wife.
(Was this a picture of Telemann’s own wife? We’ll never know.)
The difference here was that the Boston Early Music Ensemble added a silent character from old Italian comedies, Harlequin. As played by Montréal‑based director, dancer, mime Marie‑Nathalie Lacoursière. I couldn’t print a static picture. Ms Lacoursière leaped, crept, danced jigs and ballets, ran circle around poor Pimpinone–and even augmented Ino with lachrymose poses.
The two main characters had sterling voices. Ms Danielle Reutter‑Harrah has a soprano lightness and litheness which literally floated through Caramoor’s Venetian Theater. So light, so effortless was this voice that one has a difficult time seeing the wicked money-grubber beneath the skin.
Mr Immler was strong, fearless, quite a nice old gentleman. Admittedly, the first and second sections musically plodded along. Entertaining enough but hardly exuberant. The final third had two startling arias. One was a vicious argument between the two, a musical argument which almost comes to vocal fisticuffs.
The second was as original as Ino’s gorgeous finale. Here, Mr Immler sung a duet–with himself. A few baritone lines woe his situation. The next few lines–in faultless falsetto–speaks the gossip about his situation. It didn’t end there. A whole aria danced between baritone and falsetto!
The staging was never without motion, never without dances and chases, face‑to‑face feuds or back‑to‑back insults. The costumes, changing for each act, were equally colorful.
Finally, the 12-piece Boston Early Music Chamber Ensemble, true to the 18th Century period, played without a conductor. The dances were exuberant, the flute duets charming.
Yet charm was not the key for these two works. They were surprising, they rode on the cusp of the early 19th Century, and they gave Telemann–I shouldn’t say this–an aptitude for genuine showmanship.
Harry Rolnick
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