The Pacific Opera Project goes all out with an obscure Vivaldi showpiece, refashioning the hipster Ebell Club in Highland Park.
It has never been easy to come to terms with prolific artists. The old saw is that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. He didn’t. He could always surprise and delight, just like the recent exhibition of Picasso’s seldom-seenat the UCLA Hammer Museum revealed an artist who spent nearly every waking moment making something special.
For “Ercole,” POP has turned the Ebell into a funky Baroque opera house. The company installed rickety, unfinished “boxes” surrounding floor seating. All seats are folding chairs. Elegance is in your imagination.The sets are painted backdrops, again in Baroque fashion. The costumes by Maggie Green All Vivaldi operas are rarities. The arias are virtuoso show pieces, vividly descriptive . They may lack the character depth of Handel’s great works for the stage, but singers get a kick out of them, and occasionally a great artist might use her pull for a Vivaldi production, as Marilyn Horne once did for “Orlando,” and leave behind an evening of operatic wow. A recording of “Ercole,” made in 2010 , features the likes of Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau offering endless delight.
They, moreover, put themselves on the line like no others. The intimacy is such that even with a proscenium stage, this is the epitome of immersive opera. The singers are completely exposed vocally, yet wondrously daring. On the next two Saturdays they will bravely sing matinee and evening performances of the two-hour-and-20-minute opera.“Ercole” concerns one of Hercules’ dozen labors, this one requiring him to obtain the weapons from Antiope, the queen of the Amazons.
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