Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 22:22:31 +0000 From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Guildhall Calisto Dear all, I saw the final performance of Calisto at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on Saturday. Through a logistical cockup, I failed to get a program, so apologies for not including full credits. I'll be sorry in a few years, because there were several singers who are going to be famous, and I won't be able to say "I saw them...". (If anyone has the cast, could you post it or pass it on to me?) Nicholas Kok conducted. Calisto is close to being standard repertoire these days, perhaps because it represents a version of the baroque that can be interpreted as post-modern--the action combines fragments of Greek myths to produce comic, absurd or kinky scenes in the manner of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Or maybe because it's great fun (in a slightly unsound way) and the music is attractive. I imagine the appeal in this production, a college showcase, is that there are a large number of interesting roles, and only one heavily demanding one (Diana/Jupiter as Diana). The putative main plot concerns the elevation of the nymph Calisto to become the constellation Ursa Major. Her fate is for Jupiter to seduce her and Juno to turn her into a bear before she becomes immortal. To do his bit, Jupiter turns himself into Diana, the virgin goddess. In the other plot, Diana proper has the only affair of her life with the shepherd Endymion, who also has to be elevated to heaven so she can have him for ever. To keep the couples parallel, Juno has Calisto tormented by the Furies when she is turned into a bear, and Endymion is tortured by Pan and some satyrs, because Pan is also in love with Diana. Calisto meets Diana proper after her encounter with Jupiter as Diana, and wonders why she spurns her, and Endymion asks Jupiter as Diana to save him from the satyrs and is distressed when she doesn't. Oh, and Diana has a horny sidekick called Lymphaea (sp? Linfea in Italian), who first turns down and then goes off with a particularly uncouth little satyr in a lowlife version of the main plots. The action is set in the aftermath of Phaethon's fatal ride in the chariot of the sun, and the production took this up by making the main set scorched earth with ossified bodies and body parts lying around. (Possibly an allusion to the fate of Orpheus, itself an image of Ovidian poetics.) A hermaphrodite in dying Gaul pose was prominent on a mound downstage left, presumably alluding to the various gender transgressions in the plot and casting. The cast variously formed part of the landscape as well. Heaven was an arched platform with a blue neon edge across the back of the stage. All the singers were energetic and acted impressively, and there were several outstanding performances. Mercury, Jupiter's Leporello-like sidekick, had a suitably demonic presence and voice. Endymion (William Purefoy, who managed to get himself a puff in the Guardian) looked and sounded charming. I suspect he's mainly interesting as an English counter-tenor comparable to the younger Americans rather than to Chance and Bowman. And Diana was a glorious mezzo who seemed more at home as a laddish quasi-Lesbian Jupiter as Diana than as the virgin huntress. Altogether a very enjoyable performance. I last saw one of these Guildhall productions in the early 1980s, a deeply conventional Merry Wives of Windsor. I'm glad that performance values (including singing, but also all the rest) seem to have improved so radically. Regards, Helen