Early Music Vancouver (EMV) and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra (PBO) performed a reproduction of an early 18th-century cantata by Handel – Apollo e Dafne — at the Vancouver Playhouse. Also performed were Bach's Orchestral Suite in C Major and Handel's duet Tacete, ojimè, tacite.
The cantata tells a tale found in Metamorpheses, a first century Latin narrative poem largely believed to be Ovid's greatest work. It was created in Europe at a time when the Church had banned opera performances, although rather shorter than unabridged operas.
At a mere 45 minutes, it still has “all the essential ingredients that an opera needs,” according to Alexander Weimann, PBO artistic director. “The theme is unhappy, unanswered, passionate love and all the feelings and disappointments and turbulences and troubles that come with it.”
The cantata performance involved two internationally-renowned soloists — soprano Yulia Van Doren and bass-baritone Douglas Williams. Van Doren holds top prizes from all four United States Bach vocal competitions and two of her opera recordings have been nominated for Grammy awards. Williams has starred in two grand opera productions created by two world-class director-choreographers.
The music direction is led by Weimann, an outstanding director, soloist and chamber music partner who has an Opus Award-winning CD and a Juno Award-winning album among his myriad of accomplishments.
Weimann calls Apollo e Dafne “a mini opera, which was never meant to be staged.”
This and other similar cantatas depicted the same matters that were depicted in the then-banned operas, serving as an outlet for wide audiences yearning for the passion, lust and death that the operas presented. They were disguised as innocent works showing mythological or historical figures.
It tells the story of Apollo — the god of music in ancient Greek and Roman mythology — who is punished by Eros — the Greek equivalent of Cupid — for being overly proud of his archery skills and thus falls in love with a nymph — Daphne.
Even after being rejected, Apollo manages to catch up with Daphne in her flight, begging her to stay. But she cries to her father, Peneus — Greek river god — to save her, saying, "Help me, Peneus! Open the earth to enclose me or change my form, which has brought me into this danger!”
Her father complies, changing her into a laurel tree, to the shock of Apollo. Greek mythology has it that Apollo used his powers of ever-youth to cause the leaves of the laurel tree to become evergreen as they are today.
“Even though it is a revival, it's not about the reviving. It's actually about discovering the vitality that’s in a piece, even though that piece is [over] 300 years old,” said Weimann on the cultural importance of reviving such an old work.
He explained that this cantata belongs to the historical Baroque period of which theatre productions included high exaggeration as well as plot twists. He said that in this form of theatre, human interactions are preferred over individual feelings.
“It's not so much about the psychology between [the players] and not about their individual feelings as much as it's about their interaction,” he said. “In a way, the Baroque theatre looks at people and the way they interact and play together — it's almost a new take on sociology.”
The Bach Suite is different, being a very festive and magnificent suite of movement. It begins with a French overture — a musical form characteristic of the Baroque — and moves on to various international dances. The chamber duet was created by Handel between 1707 and 1709, soon after he was invited to Italy by the Medici family.
The performance captured the ears and hearts of audience members by presenting to them 18th century-European entertainment. In the end, works like these are a very important aspect of humans expressing themselves.