The well-known countertenor Max Emanuel Cencić has been dealing with baroque music for around twenty years. Last year he launched the Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival and took over its artistic direction. The city's margravial opera house was the ideal new home for baroque singing, enthuses the Austrian singer. It has always been his dream to "find a place where unknown works of the opera seria can be regularly rediscovered and experienced on stage". The Margravial Opera House, built from 1744 to 1750 and with its interior made entirely of wood, has been preserved almost unchanged and was declared a World Heritage Site in 2012 and reopened six years later after thorough restoration.Coincidentally, during a guest performance of his production of Johann Adolph Hasse's opera “Siroe”, Cencić came across a conversation with Clemens Lukas, the managing director of the Kultur-Partner Bayreuth team, who had enthusiastically responded to his idea of a festival at this special location. The “fateful encounter” ultimately led to the precious property being revived once a year with operas that do justice to the city's important musical theater history “before Wagner”.which do justice to the important music theater history of the city “before Wagner”.which do justice to the important music theater history of the city “before Wagner”.
Bayreuth Baroque does not see itself as another festival of early music, as it is in many places. The focus is on works of the Opera seria composed before 1750. So 2020 did not start with Handel, but with operas by Nicola Porpora and Leonardo Vinci presented two pieces by composers that are rarely used elsewhere. The overwhelming success proved Cencić and his team right. Despite the pandemic, which burst into the hopeful beginning of the preparations and resulted in massive restrictions, the new festival succeeded in establishing itself. Cencić sees not only a high artistic level as an indispensable prerequisite for this, but also media presence. His production of Porpora's “Carlo il Calvo” could only be shown to a limited audience on site,but reached more than three hundred and fifty thousand views online worldwide and was broadcast to more than seventy million households and numerous cinemas via the media partners Mezzo TV and Bayerischer Rundfunk.
The second edition of Bayreuth Baroque took place on twelve days at the beginning of September. Again you had to struggle with corona restrictions, which thwarted the intended goal of a festival lasting several weeks in advance. Last-minute opening concessions came too late to sell more tickets. So it was decided, instead of a new scenic production, as it is actually planned every year, to take up Porpora's “Carlo” again in order to offer the all-round successful live performance to those who had missed it in 2020. In addition to numerous concerts in the opera house with well-known performers such as Dorothee Oberlinger, Simone Kermes or the phenomenal countertenors Jakub Józef Orlinski and Franco Fagioli, music was also performed in other places in Bayreuth: Handel's “Judas Maccabaeus” in the city church,Dinner concerts with gambist Maddalena Del Gobbo in the lovely Hermitage outside the city.
The main attractions of the second season included three concert performances of another opera by Porpora. His “Polifemo”, premiered in 1735 at the King's Theater in London, combines two myths about the Cyclops Polyphemus. Out of jealousy, the giant murders Acis, who is in love with the nymph Galatea, and is then blinded by Odysseus in his cave, whereupon Acis becomes immortal as the river god. Porpora has packed the adventurous amalgamation of the stories not only into dramatic or entertaining recitatives with lively audio play, but also richly furnished them with spectacular coloratura and beguiling Belcantin laments, which his pupil Farinelli and his competitor Senesino were tailored to the castrato voices. At the time, he overtook his rival Handel.
In Bayreuth, Cencić put his full-bodied voice in the service of the cunning Ulisse, with hypocritically soft trills, praised the simplicity of the sheep with hypocritical soft trills, liked to be seduced by Calipso into effortless vocal flights of fancy and sang his way through wildest ornaments without sharpness.
Pavel Kudinov as a bass-agile polifemo drowned his frustration in enormously virtuoso defiance. The young counter Yuriy Mynenko had Acis affirm his love with supple cantilenas. He approached the famous aria “Alto Giove” rather cautiously, in order to unfold Porpora's ingenious melos with perseverance and bewitching with sparing orchestral accompaniment. His ornamentation not only demonstrated technical brilliance, but was always psychologically motivated. Julia Lezhneva offered vocal art of the highest perfection as a teasing Galatea. She navigated her flexible, golden soprano playfully with grace through extreme highs and lows. Clear contours, perfect division of breath and the purest intonation required admiration at all times. Rinnat Moriah as Nerea and Sonja Runje as Calipso, who sounded full of mezzo, ideally complemented the exhilarating festival of voices.George Petrou led his colorful, splendid ensemble Armonia Atenea precisely through the finely laced score.
Next year fans of the festival can look forward to a staged production of Leonardo Vinci's opera “Alessandro nell'Indie”. In addition, the stone ruin theater in the Hermitage is also to be opened up. The course of the pandemic will ultimately decide whether Cencić can get closer to his goal in 2022 of presenting several baroque operas per season.