Antonio Vivaldi’s three-act opera seria Motezuma was created in Venice in 1733 (months after Handel’s extraordinary Orlando in London) but was thought lost until a manuscript turned up in Germany in 2002. The story is a romanticized and fanciful adaptation of the destruction of Motezuma’s Aztec empire in Mexico by the Spanish armies of Fernando Cortés in the early 16th century. In the opera, all ends on an optimistic note with the marriage of Motezuma’s daughter Teutile to Cortés’ brother Ramiro.
This performance, staged by the ever-enterprising Ensemble Caprice as part of the Festival de musique Montréal Baroque, not only represented the work’s Montreal première but also “inaugurated” a new performing space, the Théâtre Saint-James in historic Old Montreal. In fact, the theatre is the refurbished main lobby of a former bank, with its huge high-domed ceiling and stone and cement walls having remained largely intact. There were the usual and expected teething problems: amenities were rather less than basic and the performance started 25 minutes late. (En passant, memo to the organisers; the uncomfortable plastic chairs provided for the audience members that packed the hall simply will not do.)
Ensemble Caprice under its founding artistic director Matthias Maute has become one of Canada’s most accomplished, imaginative and versatile Baroque groups, and this ambitious project demonstrated many of the ensemble’s considerable virtues. Maute had prepared his imposing instrumental group in his customary meticulous and scrupulous manner, while his internal pacing of an admittedly difficult work was as memorable as his conducting was a consolidating and positive element of the performance. Period performing practices were fully respected and ensemble playing was refreshingly unified, and though overall balance favoured the excellent woodwinds and brass, the string articulation was never less than adequate. Above all, the instrumental performance had tremendous rhythmic energy as well as the required dramatic contrasts.
Several artistic choices were, however, more debatable. The performance was “enhanced” by a series of off-white images of vegetation and Aztec masks that were projected onto the large west wall of the former bank. Their purpose was puzzling and often distracting; their arbitrary nature created neither a semblance of décor nor added any underlying atmosphere or any psychological dimension to the performance. Maute had also decided to replace the opera’s numerous recitatives with a narration supplied by an actor portraying Motezuma. Not only was the text largely insipid and ungainly but it was provided only in English (Montreal is a largely Francophone city, after all). In addition, the theatre’s booming acoustics ensured that large parts of the text either lacked clarity or were over-projected.