The choice of bringing an oratorio to the main stage of an opera festival – even a rarely staged oratorio to an opera festival specialising in rarities – could seem a bit of an anticlimax. But Haydn’s great work La Creazione (Die Schöpfung), here in an Italian translation by Dario Del Corno, provides plenty of musical pathos, regardless of its stage form, and so fits just right into this year's programme of the Festival della Valle d’Itria. The style is a mixture of the Baroque oratorio and the Classical 18th-century style. To simplify to the extreme, think Handel’s choruses and Mozart’s arias. This is not to say this work doesn’t achieve a high degree of originality and “modernity”; quite the opposite in fact, especially in its traits of tone poem.
Director Fabio Ceresa applies to Haydn's work what we can call his usual “Baroque divertissement” treatment, here, however, with mixed success. On Tiziano Santi's very bare stage with abstract props, the three archangels in geometrically stylised Baroque costumes (by Gianluca Falaschi and Gianmaria Sposito) alternate with a group of dancers from Fattoria Vittadini. In a parallelism between divine and artistic creation, to each of the six biblical days the director associates one of the liberal arts. Whether one agrees with this concept or not, the result was to distract rather than enhance the enjoyment of the music. If, to the excessive movement on stage (by choreographer Mattia Agatiello), we add the multiple touches of irony scattered throughout the staging (like the rock dance during one of the choruses in praise of God), the effect was one of deviation from the intention of the music, which is the communication of a sacred sense of wonder in the presence of nature’s beauty.