Opera can both move in strange ways and change perceptions of a canon. Specifically, the Los Angeles Opera began its 2012-2013 season by anticipating Verdi’s two hundredth birthday. It was an excellent version of the too rarely performed I Due Foscari. I may have been the only person in the large audience who had seen it staged in North America, having done so at the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1972. I recall about as much of that as I do of my birth. The evening nonetheless was variously memorable. We attended the season’s opening night of September 15, 2012, just a few days after the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, Lybia. The evening began with its apparently normal celebratory first-night Star Spangled Banner, but then a special tribute to the fallen. Thereafter, when young Jacopo Foscari (Francesco Meli) is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, his grieving wife Lucrezia (Marina Poplavskya) prays for mercy. During the scene a long horizontal ceiling light frame received reflection from another ceiling light that projected a slanted vertical bar, thus creating a skewed cross. Lucrezia’s plea nonetheless is rejected. The evening also confirmed the wonderful transition of Placido Domingo (Franceso Foscari) to baritone – by the seventy one year old Spanish tenor, actor, director, and conductor who has been instrumental in elevating Los Angeles Opera to major if often uneven status.

I began with a nineteenth-century Italian opera to suggest the power of the unintended consequences for which opera can be responsible, and to which I shall return when I consider recent Handel productions. For now, however, note that the last two years have seen an amiable explosion of baroque opera in Anglophone countries. William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants performed Lully’s Atys (1676) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September of 2011. Handel was well represented as well: the Lyric Opera of Chicago staged Rinaldo (1711) in 2012; the Chicago Opera Theater staged Teseo (1713); and the English National Opera followed with Giulio Caesare (1724), its English Julius Caesare,in October of 2012.

I. ATYS

Lully’s Ovid-based Atys was part of BAM’s 150th anniversary year. It was stunning, and crossed the ocean thanks to a happy accident. In 1987 the American philanthropist Robert Stanton stumbled into the Opéra Comique in Paris and saw Atys. It began his love of baroque opera and of William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants in particular. Two years ago, he donated $3.1 million to BAM in order to recreate that opera, with its 1987 staging, costume, wigs, and dance – that is, baroque opera in baroque style. Unlike nineteenth-century opera, Lully’s Atys is designed for a small house and stage, with almost vocally conversational voices, and restrained action. No brave Tosca here to jump off a parapet to protect her virtue and to protest her lover’s murder: ‘O Scarpia, Avanti a dio!’ The restraint is true for the dance as well, and another surprise for those used to classical Russian ballet. No anorexic women in tutus leaping across a stage into the arms of a lucky muscular boy toy in tights. Instead, meticulously clothed gentlemen arrange themselves in clear lines, perform the brief baroque semi-squat and tight circles, in which comparably tight pirouettes allow the skirt of their coats to swirl next to the fellow-dancer’s swirling coat, with no margin for error. Atys is properly called opera and its dance properly called ballet; but each is a different species within their genres.

Atys was one of Louis XIV’s favorite operas, in part I suspect because of its appropriately ancienne regime sub-text. Atys loves Sangarade, who is betrothed to Célénus, but who prefers Atys. Alas, the powerful goddess Cybèle also loves Atys, whom she elevates to the important role of her Sacrificer, and who wrongly uses his power to break off the engagement between Sangarade and Célénus. Bad idea. The offended but mournful Cybèle kills Atys, over whom she sings a movingly tender tribute of loss. Translation: Louis XIV loves his subjects and wants their love and loyalty. He will be saddened by their demise if they reject him, but disobedience is fatal. It is not personal. Just business. The audience at BAM did not care about Bourbon absolutism. Conclusion of the four hour Atys brought one of the few well-deserved standing ovations. Robert Stanton had also recently been awarded a French Legion of Honor whose ribbons when he is in France grace his jacket lapel. This pleases him, he says, because he then can dine in French restaurants without a reservation.

II. GIULIO CAESARE AND THE RESURGENCE OF BAROQUE OPERA

Giulio Caesare , when properly baroque, also would have pleased Stanton. In 1966 Julius Rudel and the New York City Opera created an American revolution. Handel operas rarely were performed and Giulio Caesare rarely among the rare. Its four hours and elaborate sub-plot were daunting. Rudel and NYCO abbreviated the opera, largely ignoring the sub-plot of Cornelia, beheaded Pompey’s wife, and her revenging son Sesto.  A prime rule of New York opera at the time was to end early enough for an often suburban audience to make the last train home. Another rule was that men needed to sound like men. Instead of a counter-tenor as Caesar, the company transposed the part for the excellent and sadly late bass-baritone Norman Treigle and a blood-in-the-water toughness difficult for counter tenors. The marvel of marvels, though, was Beverly Sills’s Cleopatra, a role that launched her career into the stratosphere. NYCO took the opera on the road, and I was able to see it in Los Angeles in 1968. However abbreviated, the consequent recording established itself as a masterpiece of operatic performance. Long thereafter, I also saw a Boston Baroque performance on a far smaller stage and hall, and with a company short on funds and long on imagination. Cleopatra was not the Sills-diva bedecked with some twenty pounds of costume that encouraged straight posture, concise gestures, and vocal brilliance rather than physical movement. This Caesare also dropped most of the sub-plot, costumed young and attractive Cleopatra in a slinky dress and gave her the air of a queen in an imperial singles bar: ‘Hey Centurion. Seen a Caesar around here? I need a throne, he needs a date, and we need to hook up’ was the amusing but effective tone.

There have been numerous Handel operas at numerous houses after the New York triumph. The important 2005 Glyndebourne David McVicar production of Giulio Caesare is being revived at the Met in April and May of 2013. Such revivals often are uneven, but generally worth at least one cheer, if not two, as with the Chicago Lyric Opera’s Rinaldo.

III. RINALDO AT THE CHICAGO LYRIC OPERA

Opera’s long history in Chicago was troubled by the great fire, and the depression of the late 1920s. The Lyric Opera itself dates from 1954 and has become one of America’s great companies. This is not surprising: Chicago is America’s best city for architecture, symphony, and theater, Broadway notwithstanding. The Lyric Opera itself is a massive 3,563 seat auditorium whose handsome art-deco interior allows room for its audience to mingle in heavy coats during the long Chicago winter. For comparison, the Metropolitan in New York seats 3,800, La Scala 3,600, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles 3,197, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden 2,256, and the Vienna State Opera 2,280. Chicago clearly is among the largest of major opera houses, and thus clearly offers both advantages and disadvantages. Voices need to be big, and staging needs to be overt not subtle. Size also offers a variety of pricing options, one of which I took: $59 seats in the last few rows of the orchestra (stalls). The price was right; the ability to perceive action less so, and much of the action itself counter-productive.

Rinaldo was Handel’s first Italian opera for the London stage. Aaron Hill based his libretto on Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1580). Giacomo Rossi translated the libretto into Italian, and Hill himself arranged for the opera’s many ‘machines’ and special effects. The sorceress Armida, for example, flies onto the stage in a chariot drawn by fire-breathing dragons. The entire production was radically international: Handel of course was German and Hill English. The Neapolitan castrato Nicolini was Rinaldo, Elisabetta Pilotta-Schiavonetti, Italian with Hanoverian connections, was Armida, and her rival the French-Italian Isabella Girardeau was Rinaldo’s inamorata Almirena. The thirty piece orchestra included some of the best musicians from Italy, France, and Britain. Like Giulio Caesare, Rinaldo was long forgotten before reappearing in Halle in 1954, the Metropolitan Opera in 1984, and Glyndebourne in 2011, of the major houses.

The complex plot is made more so by three principals whose names sound alike. Goffredo’s crusaders are besieging Jerusalem, about which the Saracen leader Argante and his beloved Armida are not amused. She kidnaps Goffredo’s daughter Almirena in order to distract and demoralize her lover Rinaldo, who then searches for her. Almirena is imprisoned in Armida’s magic garden, but immediately attracts Argante, who nonetheless refuses to release her. Shortly thereafter, Armida orders captured Rinaldo to appear before her and prepare for his death, but promptly falls in love with him; he as promptly spurns her; Armida just as promptly turns herself into Almirena, whom Rinaldo embraces, and then scorns when he realizes the deception. These dangerous complications may turn out well after all. Argante then enters, tells the infuriated Armida that he loves Almirena, who then refuses to use her magic on his behalf. He swears that he will defeat the Christians without her help. Armida leaves in anger. Thereafter, Goffredo and his brother Eustazio fail to free Almirena, whom Armida prepares to kill. Rinaldo reappears, and strikes Armida with his sword, upon which she and her magic garden disappear. The three men and Almirena joy in their reunion now on a plain with Jerusalem in the background. The battle for the city begins the next day: the crusaders win, Rinaldo and Almirena celebrate their love and pending marriage, Armida breaks her magic wand, and she and Argante convert to Christianity. Goffredo forgives his adversaries, and all are reconciled.

Rinaldo as a musical experience was splendid. The baroque specialist Harry Bicket conducted the Lyric’s fine orchestra with tact and precision. David Daniels probably is today’s premier counter tenor and an excellent Rinaldo. Julia Kleiter as Almirena was sweetly moving in her love for Rinaldo. Elza van den Heever as Armida was impressively wicked, but soft enough in love scenes to suggest that she was worth saving. Sonia Prina’s betrousered Goffredo worked well enough, thanks to her deeper contralto. Iestyn Davies as Eustazio was the other good counter tenor, and Luca Pisaroni was one tough Argante – alternately martial and arrogant, and love sick. Like Kleiter’s Almirena, he convinces us that reconciliation and forgiveness for such adversaries makes sense. A congratulatory note as well, to Celia Hall, simply one of the women. You will see her below in Teseo. She is a product of the Lyric’s training school, and is almost certainly going to be a voice that, as it were, will be heard from.

After all that, what could be wrong? A great deal, and almost all of it based upon Francisco Negrin’s cumbersome staging that imposed itself upon the material. The dancers tried to reflect Almirena’s furies and rage, but succeeded only in seeming like frenzied guys in tank tops trying to catch their recalcitrant dates at a hook-up haven. We know that we are in Jerusalem, because a large plexi-glass wall spells out the name of the city in Italian. It also serves as a place for singers to scale presumably to suggest siege works. Negrin replaces Armida’s imprisoning garden with a giant harpsichord, within whose tall upper columns Almirena is imprisoned. Armida appears to pound away on it, while the excellent harpsichordist Jory Vinikour played the real harpsichord – the most unmusical of instruments here made handsomely musical. That music was not helped by smoke streaming from the harpsichord as the percussion-aria ended. The contrast of the Lyric’s top-drawer singing and music, with disruptive directing should be instructive. It was a lesson that the Chicago Opera Theater learned, and the English National Opera did not.

IV. TESEO AT THE CHICAGO OPERA THEATER

The Chicago Opera Theater is housed in the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, in Millenium Park, within the handsome Grant Park on Michigan Avenue and the lake front. The theater is largely below grade, because of Grant Park’s height limitations. It has excellent acoustics and sight lines and with a capacity of 1,525 is reasonably well suited to baroque opera. The Harris Theater also is the home of the Joffrey Ballet, and the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago company. The Chicago Opera Theater itself does not compete with its larger sibling, the Lyric Opera, but it can take more chances and can do sequences, as with a Medea trilogy: 2010, Franceso Cavelli’s Giasone (Jason, 1649), 2011, Charpentier’s Medée (1694, which I saw Les Arts Florissants perform and will be at the ENO in 2013); and Teseo, the last of their Medea trilogy: Chicago Opera Theater’s young and generally promising singers often perform splendidly, as they did for Teseo. Several of the smaller parts in Les Arts Florissants’ Atys were drawn from William Christie’s training group, the Jardin des Voix. Two of the principals in the Chicago Opera Theater’s Teseo were drawn from American equivalents: the mezzo Renée Tatum as Medea was nurtured in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program; Cecilia Hall as Teseo was nurtured in the Lyric Opera’s Ryan Opera Center. Each was excellent, in an opera so little performed that, according to the theater program, it was ignored until 1974, and largely left to oblivion thereafter. That is a shame, since in spite of another complex plot, the mingled orchestral and vocal musics are impressive, in this Handel’s third Italian opera for the London stage. 

Medea seeks asylum and alliance with Egeo, King of Athens. He will protect and marry her in return for her magical powers. He needs help because he is at war with the Pallantides, and lacks a legitimate heir. His bastard son has long disappeared, but can reclaim the throne if he liberates his father’s sword, hidden beneath a large boulder. Teseo, though, leads Egeo’s army in hopes of claiming the throne for himself. The opera begins with a bloody Teseo leading Egeo’s ward Agilea into a protected area of the palace. She admits her love for Teseo and her fears for him in combat. The king’s valet Arcano reports on the war’s progress, sees Agilia’s friend Clizia, and of course falls in love with her. She responds warmly, but nonetheless evokes his jealousy. Meanwhile, Egeo decides that Agilea is a better match for him than Medea, who now prefers Teseo. Medea, tortured by having murdered her children, is further troubled when Egeo tells her that he will banish her from Athens. No matter: she transfers her prudent affections to Teseo, whom she thinks will indeed become king. Arcano so fears as well, and warns Egeo that Teseo’s military triumphs have endeared him to the people. Worse still, as victorious Teseo enters Athens, Medea claims that Egeo suspects him of duplicity, and that only she can pacify him. Naive Teseo trusts the sorceress who again hates Egeo. The sub-plot thickens, as Arcano seeks to ask Egeo for permission to marry Clizia. She has arranged a meeting between Agilea and Teseo, but Arcano makes plain that Egeo will marry Agilea, much to Medea’s anger. She uses her magic to torture Arcano and Clizia and deny Egeo the hand of Agilea. Egeo is less of a ninny than he seems, frees Arcano and Clizia from Medea’s spell, realizes that she is his enemy and vows vengeance. She urges reluctant Agilia to marry Egeo and conjures the image of sleeping Teseo whom she threatens to kill if Agilia will not indeed marry Egeo. Agilia relents, weepingly tells Teseo that she does not love him, but succeeds both in convincing him that she does love him, and convinces Medea that such love should continue. They are exquisitely happy. For the time being. Medea persuades Egeo to give Teseo a deadly potion, which will eliminate him as a rival and endear her to the king. Egeo takes the bait, pretends to apologize to Agilia and Teseo, and offers him the poisoned cup as a toast of friendship. Teseo draws his sword in order to swear loyalty to the king when, lo and behold, Egeo recognizes the sword as the one he buried, and the one that only his son, of course Teseo, must have reclaimed. He knocks the cup from Teseo’s hand, admits his crime, permits the unions of Teseo and Agilia and Arcano and Clizio and all are jolly, except for enraged and dangerous Medea, who remains homicidal but is thwarted.

The young company’s singing is excellent. Mezzo Renée Tatum is as fine an actress as a singer, and makes Medea less a malign sorceress than an angry, grieving, and dangerous woman about whom we almost, almost, might feel sorry. Manuela Bisceglie is the tender Agilea, whose lyrical voice captures Teseo’s heart, and whose tears convince him that she loves him, in spite of her pretended rejection of him. Cecilia Hall’s Teseo is first rate, both for acting and for singing. She is toughly heroic and tenderly loving with handsome technique for the ornate vocal lines that Handel asks of her. Deanna Breiwick, a light soprano as Clizia, and counter-tenor David Trudgen as Arcano are a fine couple, if in each case with smaller voices though still appropriate for their Chicago venue. The only problem, indeed, is one that is writ large in the ENO Julius Caesar: Teseo’s main voices include two mezzos, two sopranos, and two counter tenors and thus, to my ear, insufficient tonal variation. The only tenors and baritones are in the chorus and they also are balanced out by two sopranos and two mezzos. A low budget may partially account for the flattened variation, but it also had an at least compensating advantage. 

I have, and will, complain about cumbersome staging, in which the director trusts himself more than the material. To some degree, this is a function of wealth: hire a ‘hot’ person for ample sums at a major company. There are virtues to limited finances, one of which is acceptance of simplicity in which voice, music, and stage are organic rather than splintered. That was true for the Chicago Opera Theater’s Teseo and its modest-sized auditorium and stage. Set designer François-Pierre Couture provided sleekly modern staging: three large, towering marbled doors stand to the left, set off by two sets of tables, two chairs, and three chandeliers. The dark lighting is appropriate for a plot concerning war, competing love conflicts, and potential dynastic change. Of course it also is appropriate for the dark and unnatural murderess Medea, whose final defeat signals the movement toward light. The director James Darrah asked his splendid singers for simple and semi-stylized action that allowed the emotions to appear, and allowed them to cohere with Handel’s faithfully and well played music conducted by Michael Beattie. The six main voices were handsomely seconded by a chorus drawn from the Chicago Opera Theater’s Young Artists Program. I do not know whether that equals the Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center, but they were very good and supported the more intense soloists well. This was the first time that I have visited the Chicago Opera Theater, and I hope that it is not to be the last. It will stage Verdi’s rarely performed Joan of Arc in September of 2013, but there are no baroque or classical operas in its immediate portfolio.  

V. JULIUS CAESAR AT THE ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA, LONDON.

The ENO has long regarded itself as Handel’s earthly home away from his heavenly home. Those of us who saw Nicholas Hytner’s impressive Xerxes (1738) in 1995, restaged at the ENO in 2005, would have high expectations. As the Independent reported in that year, ‘It’s been one of English National Opera’s greatest triumphs, and that’s remarkable in itself given that Handel’s operas – which all the major UK companies tackle regularly these days – were once regarded as hopelessly antiquated and even unstageable.’ All the sadder, then, that the ENO Julius Caeser was such a mess, largely because of overbearing, uncomprehending, and self-important staging. The director also was the choreographer: Michael Keegan-Dolan. The two hats do not fit well.

The modern dress opera includes all of the Cornelia-Sesto sub-plot. It begins with a crocodile hanging by its tail, center stage. Caesar has won his civil war over Pompey, who has retreated to Egypt. He enters, sees the crocodile, draws a pistol, and puts a bullet in its head.  Message: if he did that to a croc, think of what he will do to Egypt if necessary. He also declares that to cement the peace he will spare Pompey and restore Roman unity. Ptolemy, Cleopatra’s brother and competitor for the Egyptian throne, thinks that he can win Caesar’s approbation and alliance by presenting him with Pompey’s head. Wrong move. Caesar is angry and Cornelia and Sesto are distraught. Cleopatra later complains that Ptolemy wants the throne that is rightly hers; she schemes to get and keep it by pretending to be her maid Lydia and seducing Caesar. He then materializes on stage in tuxedo top and boxer shorts below before discovering the truth. He finds Lydia/Cleo attractive nonetheless, restores his britches, and seeks to go off with her. Cleopatra now sings the ravishing ‘V’adoro pupille’ (I adore you, eyes), to which Caesar tenderly replies. They leave the stage, and Ptolemy returns. He disembowels the crocodile, which is female, and removes her eggs which he soon will use as croquet balls for threatening purposes. There is more animal slaughter to come.

In the next scene, Caesar appears in his undershirt, wearing a Stetson and carrying a rifle, having just shot a large giraffe, now hanging center stage. He later is chased off when Ptolemy’s troops attack and he and his second in command are forced to jump out of a window into the Nile. (Perhaps that is why he needed to knock off the crocodile in Act I.) Triumphant Ptolemy enters, reclaims the crocodile-egg croquet balls, suggests that he will aim them at Pompey’s offspring Sesto, and seems to be in command of everything, including the large dead giraffe still on stage and now beheaded. That presumably makes it easier for him to put his arm into its mouth, pull out its tongue, and taunt Sesto with it. Fortunately, Caesar swims out of the river, returns to the castle, regains power, and in turn empowers Sesto, who shoots Ptolemy dead. Cornelia exults in so dutiful a child. Caesar and Cleopatra are close, very close, buddies, Caesar controls Egypt for her, and the rest as they say is history and herstory.

The wonderful opera was vitiated by matters other than foolish staging. Cleopatra’s ‘V’adoro pupille’ is a turning point in the opera, during which Cleopatra and Caesar begin to love one another. The director stages this as if it is indeed a staged performance: each person sings to a microphone, as if only mouthing lines for an audience. The director-choreographer placed dance scenes in almost every vocal scene. It was distracting, and often both silly and perplexing. The dancers sometimes wore ski-like masks for reasons not immediately clear. The dancing was radically unbaroque and seemed more like open mic night at the local rock palace, where guys in muscle shirts and women in skinny jeans parade their stuff. Sesto obviously was written for a male voice, but the director chose to have him female. Both the mother Cornelia (Patricia Bardon) and her daughter Sesto (Daniella Mack) were mezzo-sopranos. Cleopatra (Anna Christie) was a soprano. Caesar (Lawrence Zazzo), Nirenus (James Laing) Cleopatra’s servant, and Ptolemy (Tim Mead) all were counter tenors. Even the odd baritone in a small part could not do enough to differentiate the voices and their roles when two mezzos and three counter tenors seemed all too vocally close.

The moral of the story of the two very different concepts behind Atys and Julius Caesar, to which I would add the Palais Garnier’s Rake’s Progress: the ‘auteur’ theory, here the director’s imposition of his own interests upon received material, works poorly when that imposition obscures the text. In Atys the restrained dances complement action; the well-tailored dancers with controlled motions denote the controlled world that Atys had violated and for which he pays a fatal price. In Julius Caesar the major vocal and conceptual errors competed with one another and diminished the production. Lack of discrimination among voices flattened audience response; foolish props distracted from the action; excessive, poorly symbolic, and physically voluble dancing threatened to overwhelm rather than support the vocal and plot actions. Cutting out crocodile eggs that become croquet balls, and cutting out a giraffe tongue that becomes a taunting-tool strike the audience as grotesque rather than supportive.

Nevertheless, the singing was generally good and Patricia Bardon excellent. Christian Curnyn’s direction of the ENO orchestra was crisp and, staging to the contrary, Cleopatra’s endearing ‘V’adoro pupille’ as she tempts Caesar, remains one of the most beautiful of Handel’s arias and competes for first prize only with Miriam’s song in Israel in Egypt (Sing ye to the Lord).  In Giulio Casesare Caesar subtly responds to Cleopatra with his own yearning. The 1966 New York City version chose wisely by selecting the bass-baritone Norman Treigle to play Caesar. That is not consistent with eighteenth-century practice, but neither are castration of boys, disemboweled crocodile eggs, giraffe tongues, rock dancing, ski masks, boxer shorts, revolvers, Stetsons, microphones, and women named Sesto. 

VI. THE RAKE’S PROGRESS IN FRANCE.

I began this review by praising Les Arts Florissants’ splendid Atys and its amiable version of Lully’s baroque opera. I conclude with a brief mention of the Opéra National de Paris and its recent production of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress (1951). I say at once that the renovation of the Palais Garnier (1862-1875) from 1994–2007 was sensational. The building was restored to its nineteenth-century neo-baroque, really rococo, grandeur. The red velvet seats have not been adapted for the greater height and width of modern bodies, but they promote good posture, if not good comfort.

The opera itself is scarcely the modernist effort one might expect from the composer of the Rite of Spring (1913). It includes arias and recitatives, as well as a more or less consecutive plot based on Hogarth’s prints. The libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kalman is good, but that is about where the praise stops. The adequate singing was overpowered by staging, including dancing that again detracted from rather than supported the action. Several of the opera’s reviewers paid at least as much attention to the special effects as to the singers. Here is part of Didier van Moere in Concerto Net for 16 October 2012:

On y reconnaît la patte d’Olivier Py, secondé par le fidèle Pierre André Witz pour décors et costumes, ses tics, diront les mauvaises langues. Néons aveuglants, échafaudages, machineries à découvert, foisonnement baroque, mise à nu des appétits de la chair jusqu’au sadomasochisme, mélange de bouffonneries et d’inguérissables souffrances: la virtuosité du metteur en scène se donne libre cours à travers cette parabole souvent en noir et blanc, où le héros – ou l’antihéros – se trouve perpétuellement, comme le spectateur, pris de vertige entre la fiction et la réalité, où l’initiation avortée sombre dans le refuge de la folie – le lit de l’asile est le même que celui du bordel.

‘Baroque’ here no longer means the music or dance of the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth-centuries. It means ‘sadomasochisme, mélange de bouffonneries et d’inguérissables souffrances.’ Contrast that with the elegant baroque of Les Arts Florissants’ Atys and we can see the difference between ‘auteur’ dominance in which the director colonizes the work, its music and dance, and the trust the audience would like to give but cannot.  

From baroque to ‘baroque’ is an appropriate way to end this review, in which the French Atys and the Chicago Teseo take first and strong second prize.