Since 1981, the Boston Early Music Festival has been one of the world’s most inventive and immersive summer events. This year’s June edition offered, over the course of eight days—from early morning until nearly midnight—operas, concerts, exhibitions and lectures focusing on music from medieval times through the 18th Century. While most of the events are presented by local and visiting artists, the biennial festival itself mounts as its centerpiece a fully staged revival of a near-forgotten opera, and the 2025 edition, dubbed “Love & Power,” offered Reinhard Keiser’s Die römische Unruhe, oder Die edelmütige Octavia, more conveniently known as Octavia.
Continuing the festival’s commitment to bringing its audience gems from the German Baroque, BEMF also revived its 2021 Telemann double-bill consisting of the late dramatic solo cantata Ino paired with the much earlier three-part comic intermezzo Die Ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone oder Das herrsch-süchtige Camer Mägden (or Pimpinone). The operatic offerings were once again led by the festival’s co-music directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, who have been in charge since 1997, when the festival presented Luigi Rossi’s L’Orfeo, my first encounter with BEMF. I caught the splendid revival at the Tanglewood Music Festival just after its Boston performances.
One of the most significant and widely appreciated features of BEMF operas, directed since 2007 by Gilbert Blin, is their presentation in an artfully stylized manner that emulates Baroque stagecraft with beautifully painted scenery flats that swiftly slide in and out, coupled with elaborate period costumes that the composer might have recognized. Audience members from around the world enthusiastically embrace this “old-fashioned” approach, as it so markedly differs from the controversially contemporary regietheater production style widely seen in Europe and more and more often in the U.S.
While Baroque operas in Italian and French by Monteverdi, Handel and Rameau, among others, are now seen around the world with increasing frequency, German works remain much rarer, but BEMF has been one of their most influential proponents. Before this year’s Keiser Octavia, the festival mounted Conradi’s Di schöne und getreue Araidne, Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow (an opera never mounted during the composer’s lifetime and one which predates Mussorgsky’s famous version by more than 150 years), as well as Handel’s Almira, the composer’s sole surviving German opera.
BEMF has also recorded Graupner’s near-four-hour Antiochus und Stratonica, which was, I believe, once planned for a festival staging. Continuing this initiative, the next edition of the festival in 2027 will spotlight Emma und Eginhard, its first full-length Telemann opera. Having attended stagings of the composer’s Der geduldige Sokrates in Berlin and Der Sieg der Schönheit just last year in Magdeburg (home of the Telemann-Festtage), I can enthusiastically recommend the chance to experience an important work by this undervalued composer.
On the other hand, Keiser proved a less compelling figure. Many got their first chance to hear his operatic music on an LP released in 1965, which included a half-hour of excerpts from Der hochmütige, gestürzte und wieder erhabene Croesus, a.k.a. Croesus, conducted by Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg, best known for his definitive recording of Weill/Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper.
Croesus, the most frequently produced Keiser opera, which received a rare U.S. staging by the Minnesota Opera nearly twenty years ago, had to wait years before it finally got a complete recording, led by René Jacobs, who has been another of German Baroque opera’s great advocates. My favorite Keiser recording is a disk of his Theatralische Music, featuring the elegant Dutch mezzo-soprano Olivia Vermeulen.
Many of these forgotten works premiered at Hamburg’s Oper am Gänsemarkt, a public, rather than court, opera house that flourished for decades until closing in 1750. Keiser was one of its most important composers, though he was briefly overshadowed by the precocious Handel, who, at age 19, composed his now-lost Nero for the “Goose-Market” company.
In 1705, Keiser presented Octavia there as his rebuttal, composed to a libretto quite similar to Nero’s by Barthold Feind. Like other works of the time, it contains an uneasy mix of serious and comic characters as well as occasional dance sequences. Octavia’s insanely complex plot revolves around the romantic and political chaos caused by Roman Emperor Nero’s all-consuming fascination with Ormœna, the married deposed Queen of Armenia. His infatuation compels him to command that his wife (edelmütige = noble), Octavia, kill herself. As nearly every opera of the time must have a lieto fine (happy ending), Octavia’s suicide attempt is foiled, which prompts Nero to come to his senses, and four “happily” reunited couples join in the festive final chorus. Octavia is enjoying an unexpected renaissance: another production simultaneously arrived at the Händel-Festspiele Halle.
One of the more remarkable features of BEMF’s operas for the festival and for its annual Boston and New York City seasons has been the core group of accomplished singers (mostly American) who appear together year after year. Octavia featured longtime veterans Aaron Sheehan, whose conflicted anarchist Piso saves Octavia, Jason McStoots as Lepidus and Christian Immler as advisor Seneca, whom Nero will sentence to death in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Monteverdi’s sequel (of sorts).
As Nero, Douglas Ray Williams, who debuted with the BEMF chorus in 2003, initially appeared to be out of sorts during Octavia’s final performance, his usually resonant bass-baritone small and constricted. During the second half, he improved but never sounded fully free. On the other hand, rising newcomers mellifluous countertenor Michael Skarke as the Armenian king Tiridates and forthright tenor Richard Pittsinger as General Fabius made much of their scant opportunities; one was eager to hear more from them both.
Octavia’s ladies, played by a quartet of BEMF favorites, dominated the afternoon. Though their roles had only tangential importance to the complex plot, Hannah De Priest and Sherezade Panthaki lent their glowing sopranos and infectious verve to the roles of Livia and Clelia, respectively. Panthaki, in particular, shone more radiantly than in my previous encounters with her.
SEE ALSO: ABT’s Summer Season Brings ‘The Winter’s Tale’ to the Met
As the competing queens, Boston’s reigning Baroque diva Amanda Forsythe as the wily Ormœna waged a valiant campaign against the long-suffering Octavia of Hungarian Emöke Baráth. But nobility won out as Keiser gave his best music to his title character. Much of the opera’s set pieces consist of straightforward arias, but Octavia, as she vacillates between choosing life or death, gets a wrenching extended scena that alternates arias with accompagnati. Baráth’s commandingly shining soprano rose to poignant heights during that scene. While most of his opera’s score is accomplished rather than memorable, Keiser is at his most inspired in Octavia’s music, with which the serenely accomplished Baráth ably demonstrated why she is among today’s most sought-after Early Music sopranos.
Longtime concertmaster Robert Mealy led the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra in a divine reading with especially ravishingly lush strings and plangent, pungent winds: Keiser makes particularly striking use of his four prominent bassoons! The deluxe continuo forces included star pluckers O’Dette and Stubbs with cello David Morris, harpist Maxine Erlander, and harpsichordist Jörg Jacobi.
If Blin’s occasionally overactive production introduced too many characters on stage at any one time, it nearly always succeeded in clarifying the opera’s messy intertwined plot lines. His cast didn’t attempt to replicate historical Baroque gestures but fully embraced the occasionally illogical eccentricities of the “historical” characters.
Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière’s delicately entrancing choreography enlivened the frequent if discursive dance sequences, a great relief after her distracting presence as the incessantly frantic Arlecchino nearly undid the previous evening’s Telemann double-bill.
Pimpinone and Ino made rather odd bedfellows, particularly as they weren’t presented consecutively, but rather the dramatic cantata was split into two halves presented between the three scenes of the comic intermezzo. As Ino, Forsythe portrayed the sister of Semele and widow of Athamas, who, while fleeing the vengeful Juno, drops her baby son into the roiling seas. The soprano was quite wondrous, handling the work’s vocal and dramatic extremes with peerless authority and enviable agility. Happily, she and BEMF have recently recorded Ino for a fantastic new all-Telemann CD from cpo, the festival’s devoted recording label, which also offers several preview arias from Emma und Eginhard.
Pimpinone’s comic battle of wills between an old bachelor and a scheming servant girl may seem familiar to those who know Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, which arrived fifteen years later. The plot twist of Vespetta first feigning modesty then turning wildly demanding after marriage also features in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. Though its recitatives and sprightly duets are performed in German, the arias are sung in Italian!
As the gullible dupe Pimpinone, Immler blustered endearingly and sang adroitly with a roundly rich bass-baritone. Occasionally, Danielle Reutter-Harrah’s energetic Vespetta sounded pinched on her very top notes but otherwise invested the conniving spitfire with delicious rhythmic vitality and boisterous fun.
When she and Immler interacted on the stunning Jordan Hall stage in front of the ebullient BEMF Chamber Orchestra, Pimpinone was a delight. However, it often floundered when a masked Lacoursière pranced frantically, mugged outrageously, and contributed little to the slight plot. Thankfully, her presence was minimal in Ino.
Both the Keiser and the Telemann puzzled me as the BEMF forces adopted an archaic practice of often performing the frequent da capo arias in mutilated form. Rather than doing the ABA’ da capo complete, often (but not always) the singer lost their second, ornamented A’ section as the orchestra ended the piece with just the repeat’s intro. The first time it happened during Pimpinone, I didn’t believe my ears and thought I’d lost track of the ABA’ form, but it happened again, then again. At intermission, I quickly scrolled through the IMSLP Pimpinone score on my phone and saw the notation “da capo” over and over. I imagine that many attending the Telemann and Keiser operas didn’t notice, but it struck me as odd that such a respected festival would fall back on a practice I thought had died out decades ago.
German Baroque wasn’t the only vocal focus of my weekend at BEMF, which also included superb works from 17th-century Italy. I was thrilled to visit Emmanuel Church (where the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson first got noticed) to hear the celebrated Belgian ensemble Vox Luminis making a welcome appearance in Vanitas Vanitatum et Omnia Vanita, a program of haunting works by Giacomo Carissimi and Kaspar Förster. Conductor Lionel Meunier, who also sings bass with his group of ten other singers and six musicians, rarely cued his forces, yet they all performed with striking unanimity.
Throughout the four pieces by Carissimi and one by Förster, the words “vanitas” and “omnia” are repeated so often that the program might make a fine drinking game! However, Meunier’s forces performed elegantly with high seriousness, each soloist moving seamlessly to their position adjacent to the church’s altar, then back to join the others. Two of the four sopranos joined in an especially heavenly duet for the opening “Vanitas,” but the expected highlight was a raptly moving rendition of Carissimi’s most celebrated work, Historia di Jepthe. Its composer relates in twenty concise minutes the same story that takes Handel three hours in his great final oratorio. Jephte’s daughter’s plaintive aria of resignation has rarely been as devastating as in the Vox Luminis version, with the sublime final chorus initially delivered by only half the singers, with the remainder joining for a powerfully moving conclusion. As Meunier asked the cheering crowd: what encore could follow such a stunning ending?
Each evening throughout the festival week, shorter, more intimate programs are offered at 10:30 p.m. Following Pimpinone/Ino, most of the performers and audience members cleared out before seven BEMF singer all-stars gathered with nine instrumentalists for Starry, Starry Night, an utterly beguiling hour of hits by Monteverdi and other seventeenth-century Italians. Dame Emma Kirkby was to have been the guest star performing three Dowland songs with O’Dette, but a family emergency prevented her appearance. I doubt anyone missed her as everyone else was on the top of their game, from buds Sheehan and McStoots divinely intertwining in “Zefiro torna” to Baráth and Immler reuniting in their marvelous contribution to BEMF’s essential Steffani CD: Duets of Love and Passion.
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