Search - Dominick Argento, Peter Jacoby, Moores Opera Center :: Argento: Casanova's Homecoming

Life is the only blessing man possesses!

Michael Anthony | Minneapolis, MN | 03/20/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Premiered in 1985, Argento's 13th opera, "Casanova's Homecoming," was long overdue for a recording. Now it has a good one, drawn from a live performance three years ago at the Moores Opera Center in Houston. Argento wrote his own libretto for what is surely his wittiest work for the stage, focusing on two lively episodes from the memoirs of the famous 18th-century rake, one involving a plot to discredit the aging Casanova's liaison with a woman impersonating a castrato and the other his presumed swindling of the rich, crazed Madame d'Urfe who is obsessed with occult mind-body transference. Argento weaves all this together skillfully, mixing 18th-century textures with his own lyrically oriented 20th-century idiom. True to opera buffa form, the score moves quickly but never loses a bittersweet, autumnal feeling, as a lovely tenor aria floats in the background and Casanova gives us his motto: 'Life is the only blessing man possesses, and those who do not live it are unworthy of it.' Conductor Peter Jacoby's well-paced performance underlines the show's humor and its sense of heartache, and he gets strong performances from his cast, most of whom, amazingly, are students. One might wish for a little more twinkle, a little more the sense of a raconteur, in Patryk Wroblewski's Casanova, but it's a solid, warm-hearted interpretation, and Débria Brown easily finds the deranged exuberance in Madame D'Urfe. Moreover, it's a tribute to Argento's skill at setting English that one can actually listen to this record without reading along in the accompanying text and understand just about every word. That can't be said about most operas in English."



Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 30, 2005



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