Idomeneo

This revival sees a dazzling new vocal ensemble: Russian tenor Sergey Romanovsky sings the title role, Dutch mezzo-soprano Olivia Vermeulen takes the stage as Idamante, and the young American Lauren Snouffer plays Ilia. Conductor Giovanni Antonini conducts Mozart's Idomeneo, perhaps the most unconventional and musically richest score of the composer's life. First performed in Munich in 1781, Mozart had not written an opera since his Salzburg Re pastore of 1775, but here the music flows through him as through open sluices: no longer the child prodigy, and in the throes of breaking away from his father, Mozart wrote this, his most profound opera. More than in any of Mozart’s other works for the stage, the characters in Idomeneo are fractured, torn apart. Perhaps none as much as the Cretan king Idomeneo, who, on his return from the Trojan War, falls into distress at sea and takes a fatal oath to the god Neptune: in the event that the god spare him, Idomeneo promises to sacrifice the first person he meets on land. That person is his son Idamante. Tormented by feelings of guilt, but unable to break his oath, Idomeneo prepares to go to his very limits. Idamante, who is making preparations of his own to succeed Idomeneo as king, suffers from his father’s traumatic rejection. The Trojan princess Ilia, on the other hand, whom the war has made both homeless and parentless, struggles with her love for Idamante, her people’s sworn enemy. Yet it Ilia the outsider who, through the power of love, shows the way out of this horror. In the end Mozart lets his characters become self-determined people who overcome the old structures.