I repeat that the Handel Festival Karlsruhe is a very special meeting place for Handelists from all over the world, performers and music lovers alike. In addition to the two operas, the programmes, which get richer every year, provide excellent opportunities for baroque music to unfold in all its beauty and complexity. This year's 2024 edition, the 46th, is a very good example, and among the participating specialist ensembles we mention:

La Stagione Frankfurt, a baroque music ensemble that was founded in 1988 and whose motto is Let's make the unheard heard! and this through forgotten works, brought back to light with the deepest respect, to the delight of interested audiences and performers alike;

Musica Sequenza, a group that Burak Ozdemir created in New York in 2008 and brought to Berlin in 2011, where it has made a name for itself with its complex and original events that combine old and new, from baroque to modern, combining music, dance, visual arts, scenography and film;

Red Priest (composer Antonio Vivaldi's nickname), a quartet formed 25 years ago in New York, which the New York Times called a wild and virtuosic little band. Now based in England, the group performs its own original arrangements of iconic baroque works, often with great success, and often with theatrical flair.

(OH!) Orkiestra Historyczna in Katowice, an ensemble formed in 2012 by Polish musicians strongly attracted to old music and which today has gained an international reputation.

Band Neopera, a Hamburg-based ensemble of three singers, four instrumentalists and a composer, which aims to combine the sounds of Händel and his contemporaries with those of the Metal style.

Spar - a classical band, an instrumental quintet full of exuberance and vigour, which succeeds in imprinting their interpretations with an expressiveness in which both past and present are found. The musicians use more than 40 types of flutes, violins, violas, violas, and a repertoire ranging from classical to modern. I attended the concert in which Spar was joined by countertenor Valer Sabadus (Săbăduș), originally from Arad but trained at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München. Today Valer Sabadus is a name strongly linked to the baroque repertoire which he performs with sensitivity and virtuosity. The Spar-Sabadus concert was entitled Almost to Paradise. How to Hear the Longing (free translation) from Handel to Depeche Mode and included works by Händel, Vivaldi, Ravel, Satie, Kurt Weil, Fauré, Schumann and other lesser-known classical and modern composers. I admire and applaud the talent and virtuosity of the performers, the dedication and joy with which they play, the impetuous and convincing way in which they feel and convey the music - it is a joy and a pleasure to listen to them! But, for me, personally, a full baroque repertoire would have added enormously to the joy and pleasure. The first five pieces by Ritter, Handel and Vivaldi were wonderful, delightful. The execution of the other works in the repertoire was also impeccable, but nothing could match the artistic performance achieved in these scores, in which the period instruments played melodies and harmonies designed specifically for them and the countertenor voice performed freely and exalted in pages written specifically for its timbre and expressiveness. I repeat, the concert delivered on its promise from Händelto Depeche Mode with great success and was rewarded with roars of heartfelt and enthusiastic applause. Deep down, however, I would have liked to have seen a Baroque to Baroque credits as I rarely have the opportunity to meet such elite performers.

I regretted not being able to hear the Gala Concert, Arias for Senesino, performed by the celebrated countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic which was certainly a baroque royalty.

My desire/hunger for Baroque music was alsofulfilled by Ottone,re di Germania, the second opera on this year's festival programme, a revival of the performance that premiered in February 2023, one of the best known and most performed works today,premiered in 1723 in London. Although the whole action is about the struggle for a throne,the composer and

librettist have focused on the feelings of the characters, each in turn unhappy with what is happening to them.

Gismonda's dream is to see her son, Adelberto, ascend the throne of Germany. But the country rightfully belongs to Ottone,who will soon arrive to take the power that belongs to him. He will marry Theophanes, the daughter of the Emperor of Rome, who has already been sent a portrait of his future husband. Ottone is delayed when pirates attack his ship. Gismonda takes advantage and introduces Adelberto to Theophanes as... Ottone. But the young woman doesn't recognizethe man in front of her as the man in the portrait she has already fallen in love with.

Ottone arrives bringing with him the pirate who attacked him, Emireno, a mysterious character who announces that he is something other than what he seems but, for now, he refusesto reveal his identity.

Princess Matilda, once Adelberto's fiancée, suffers terribly at the sight of betrayal. She reveals Gismonda's plan to Ottone. Each character is grieving, outraged, each character hopes, and in the end Ottone finds his fiancée, Emireno reveals that he is Teofana's brother, Gismondaand her son are taken prisoner but Matilda's love manages to save Adelberto. The only unhappy and inconsolable one is the scheming Gismonda, the queen left without her throne for good.

All the subjects of Handel's operas are extremely complicated! In Ottone not much happens on stage! The turmoil is in the minds and souls of the characters. They sing and sing again, wonderful arias, full of feeling, passion and love. Set designer Christophe Ouvrard has imagined two playing spaces: a foreground, a three-level section of a palace, with two thrones and many, many stairs and landings on which the characters run after something not yet understood, and, on the other half of the rotating stage, a desolate shore on which the water has washed up the wreckage of sunken ships. What is very beautiful here isthe huge projection in which ominous waves crash in an equally, seemingly, aimless motion.

In this space the characters evolve. The setting set out to mirror their moods - uncertainty, menace,despair ... Händel's music is, as usual, powerful and extremely nuanced. But the baroque composer follows the tradition of the da capo aria in which the third of the three sections variously repeats the first. A challenge for the director Carlos Wagner who seems not to accept the tradition of a singer who is asked, mainly in the arias, to sing, to suffer, to express and totransmit, not to play. Playing in Baroque opera is reserved more for the numerous recitatives which are extremely generous in their suggestions of movement. Nor could it be otherwise, for the scores demand complete concentration on the voice. Unfortunately, to enrich the movement, a few mute characters are brought into the scene, for example two soldiers who either fight, maul or stagger drunkenly past the singers. Their presence, implicitly their playing, is unnatural, forced, almost caricatured, which I, at least, found disturbing for anyone who wants to listen to and enjoy the inspiration of the great, unique composer Georg Friedrich Händel.

The same Christophe Ouvrard also signs the costume design. Inspired and inventive, the artist leads us into three different spaces of expression: Gismonda and Adelberto appear like ghosts from a by gone age, dressed in intricate baroque costumes of brilliant white. Ottone and Matilda move lightly in dark, brown leather costumes, as 19th-century theatre imagined its heroes. And Theophana and Emireno, characters led as if from the shadows by a skilled puppeteer, wear costumes of ... fair ground puppets.

Carlo Ipata, the conductor specialising in Baroque music (Cesti, Gasparini, Scarlatti, Händel, Pergolesi) has the chance to collaborate with the exceptional baroque musicians of the Deutschen Händel-Solisten ensemble. The result is a solid soundtrack that brilliantly covers the timbral-expressive range between lamento and exultate. From the first to the last note, the vigour and depth of Ottone's music is rendered with exemplary professionalism, understanding and sensitivity.

The ukrainian countertenor Yuriy Mynenco, a powerful yet flexible and richly coloured voice, is already a name on contemporary baroque stages. His tall stature gives the added presence the character demands. The Spanish soprano Lucía Martín-Cartón has won a prize at the Renata Tebaldi competition in the early music section and a stint with the famous Les Arts Florissants. Through her voice and acting, Lucía Martín-Cartón manages to capture the fragility and inner strength of Theophanes. The second countertenor voice in the cast belongs to the rather unlikable Adelberto played by RaffaelePe, another well-known and appreciated baroquesinger. Difficult task for the singer who is asked to cheat, usurp, fight while he, Adelberto, is actually scared to death of everything that happens to him. Gismonda, the ambitious queen without a crown, finds in Ukrainian mezzo-soprano Olena Leser a powerful performer with a bright, penetrating voice and a nuanced acting that impresses. Just as Sonia Prina impresses and seduces, vocally and scenically, in a tormented and contorted Matilda, where love and hate struggle in musical pages of extremedifficulty. Ingeniously, Händel brings a powerful bass voice alongside the two countertenor voices, with their distinctive timbre. Nathanaël Tavernier/ Emireno shakesthe stage at every appearance, and the arias of this strange character, full of mystery, give a very special sound balance to the score as a whole.

The Karlsruhe Handel Festival is already preparing its 47th edition. I look forward to the programme and recommend that anyone visiting the city in February next year should look out for a concert, recital or opera performance. They certainly won't regret it.

Ottone

Dramma per musica by Georg Friedrich Händel

Libretul - Nicola Francesco Haym

Ottone - Yuriy Mynenco

Teofane - Lucía Martín-Cartón

Emireno - Nathanaël Tavernier

Gismonda - Olena Leser

Adelberto - Raffaele Pe

Matilda - Sonia Prina

Deutsche Händel-Solisten

Conductor - Carlo Ipata

Director - Carlos Wagner

Scenography and costumes - Christophe Ouvrard

Stage lighting - Rico Gerstner

https://www.staatstheater.karlsruhe.de/programm/video/3371/