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Saturday’s staging by Les Arts Florissants of Henry Purcell’s 1692 masque The Fairy Queen at Caramoor in Katonah, New York was a summer dream to remember. With a loose connection to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it captured beautifully the sense of wonder and enchantment that the play embodies and that Purcell, one imagines, dreamed of when he fashioned this piece.
It did so with a brilliant fusion of superb singing and acting, studiously traditional instrumentation, and glowing modern dance. It had the energy of a zippy Broadway musical, the intensity of a street dancing battle, and the authenticity of a period comedy-drama.
Purcell’s The Fairy Queen: A Masque of Life
All this with, essentially, no story. The show bears a relation to narrative opera analogous to that between the vaudeville-rooted revue-type shows of the 1920s and the classic musicals of Broadway’s golden age. A “masque” rather than an opera, it’s a series of songs sung by a variety of characters, many of them allegorical, depicting scenes of love sweet and sour; of nature and the seasons; of dark nights and sunny daybreaks – scenes tragic, comic, and cosmic.
If music director William Christie, founder of Les Arts Florissants and a critical figure in the present-day popularization of Baroque music, had done nothing but this over his long career, it might well have established his legacy. For his part, Mourad Merzouki choreographed and stage-directed a production with eight vocal soloists, half a dozen dancers, and a 20-plus-member orchestra with many period instruments and the inimitable Augusta McKay Lodge on lead violin.
Les Art Florissants: You’ve Been Served
Singers, dancers, and even the occasional musician merged kinetically in scene after sweeping scene. Modernist costuming – sometimes even disembodied clothing – helped set moods and solidify scenes. Otherwise the production did without set or props; all the dynamism came from the exquisitely performed music and the kaleidoscopic action downstage.
Baritone Hugo Herman-Wilson established the comic side of things as the Drunken Poet and later in a comical seduction number with silver-voiced tenor Ilja Aksionov. Soprano Juliette Mey, in a duet with Lodge, drew applause that threatened to never, ever end with the lost-love plaint “O let me ever, ever weep.” Soprano Georgia Burashko commanded the unseen world with “Ye Gentle Spirits of the Air, Appear.”
Two recorder players and tenor Rodrigo Carreto hailed the avian world with “Come All Ye Songsters of the Sky.” “Thrice-Happy Lovers” featured powerful mezzo-soprano Rebecca Leggett accompanied by an agile viola da gamba player. And bodily agility was everywhere, in number after number. Dancer Samuel Florimond, for example, left us open-mouthed with break-dancing acrobatics presaging the arrival of spring. Dancers embodied gods and seasons, students and teachers, inebriated celebrants, fairies, and much, much more.
By the time the singers and dancers coalesced into a bubbling dance-fest during the instrumental Chaconne at the end, the spell was complete. The warm July evening had been elevated into a multi-era, multidisciplinary cosmos of the finest art.
Until now I had heard Les Arts Florissants only on recordings. Their album of Gesualdo madrigals, for example, is a favorite of mine. But nothing on record compares to a live, fully staged Baroque extravaganza like this Fairy Queen.
The ensemble’s upcoming performances are listed on their website.
