Proud Media Sponsor for <strong>Early</strong> <strong>Music</strong> <strong>Vancouver</strong> proud sponsor of the <strong>Vancouver</strong> <strong>Early</strong> <strong>Music</strong> <strong>Festival</strong> At GNK Insurance we are proud to provide coverage for all of your personal, professional and commercial needs. VANCOUVER BURNABY VICTORIA 3295 West Broadway 4198 East Hastings Street #2 – 3690 Carey Road <strong>Vancouver</strong>, BC V6K 2H5 Burnaby, BC V5C 2J4 Victoria, BC V8Z 3C2 Ph: 604-731-4684 Ph: 604-434-8259 Ph: 250-360-1168 Fax: 604-731-7107 Fax: 604-294-8260 Fax: 250-360-1178 www.gnkinsurance.ca <strong>Vancouver</strong>'s leading arts source. Stay connEctEd at Straight.com INSURANCE CORPORATION BASIC INSURAN EFFECTIVE JUN <strong>Vancouver</strong> <strong>Early</strong> <strong>Music</strong> <strong>Festival</strong> <strong>2012</strong> — Handel’s “Orlando” - page 4 — www.earlymusic.bc.ca
situation, and advises them to flee from Orlando’s rage. When Orlando almost seizes Angelica, Zoroastro hides her in a cloud, and in Act 3, wafts her to a Temple of Mars. And at the end of the opera he magically restores Orlando’s sanity. At the human level, much of the opera concerns the very different reactions of Orlando and Dorinda to their unrequited love. Orlando, the chief paladin of Charlemagne and the invincible knight who overcomes all military challenges, is unable to understand and accept Angelica’s rejection which he first discovers at the beginning of the second Act. His reaction moves swiftly from disbelief to violence. He chases Angelica and Medoro through the forest threatening to kill them and himself. At the end of the act he hallucinates, imagining himself on the edge of Hades where he sees Medoro in the arms of Proserpina, Pluto’s part-time wife. When he imagines Proserpina to be weeping he is momentarily calmed and observes, “even in Erebus, love calls out tears”, but he soon resumes his crazed actions. In Act 3 Orlando vows his love to Dorinda whom he thinks to be Venus—until he decides she is actually Angelica’s slain brother. In the penultimate scene he catches Angelica, tells her that death is her fate, and throws her violently into a cave. Thinking her dead, Orlando proclaims that the world is now “purged of all its malignant baleful monsters.” He seeks oblivion in the river Lethe and declares: “…perfidious love, no more, with all thy wonton wiles in store, shalt, to prolong my date of woes, awake me from my sweet repose” . By contrast the naïve young shepherdess Dorinda wonders, at the outset of the opera, if the strange new feeling she recently has experienced might be love. It becomes clear that the interest Medoro has shown for her is the cause of this incipient love. But Dorinda soon realizes that Medoro’s attention to her has waned, in spite of his claims to the contrary. In a trio at the end of the first Act, Medoro and Angelica openly acknowledge their mutual love and try to console her. Dorinda remains inconsolable and resolves to find some pastoral solitude where she will “linger out a life of woe.” In Act 2 she continues to pine for Medoro. But in the third act, when she discovers him trying to hide from the raging Orlando, she finds she still has affection for Medoro and resolves to help him, now simply as a friend. In her ensuing meeting with the princess, she listens to Angelica’s agitated torment over the depth of responsibility she increasingly thinks she must bear for Orlando’s total irrationality. After all these contrasting experiences, a more mature, cynical Dorinda now considers the myriad of difficult problems love can create. In her final aria she sums up: Love is a blast that’s often found to turn the brain in eddies round: I’ve heard it does at first impart a secret pleasure to the heart. But for one transient joy bestows a length of sad succeeding woes. In her first appearance of the opera, Angelica, the beautiful princess from Cathay, acknowledges that cupid’s arrow has finally and firmly bound her to a lover. She also acknowledges that, in past relationships, she has acted the coy minx but now she renders her heart totally to Medoro and proclaims that she will give up her “accustomed trophies”, specifically mentioning her most recent one, Orlando. Shortly afterwards when she encounters Orlando, she decides not only to hide her new love from him but also to test his present attitude towards her. She claims he is now in love with Isabella, the damsel that he recently rescued from grave difficulties. Denying this vigorously, Orlando offers to prove his continuing love for Angelica by some knightly, typically macho, undertaking: Go bid me combat, in the field, the fiercest monsters earth can yield, if you, indulgent to my fame, new trophies of my valour claim. Before Orlando has time to undertake such deeds he discovers, inadvertently through Dorinda, the reality of Angelica’s and Medoro’s love. In a blind rage he tries to track them down. Angelica realizes that she and Medoro must move immediately to her father’s kingdom…but they do not move fast enough. They linger while Medoro carves their entwined names onto trees for all to see (including Orlando) and Angelica sadly sings of having to leave behind her beloved forest. She admits to herself that she is beholden to Orlando for previously having saved her honour and life. Her abandonment of him now fuels a sense of guilt that increasingly clouds her joy with Medoro. Finally, the news from Dorinda that Orlando has killed Medoro reduces Angelica to abject grief. She cries out “…Oh unpropitious fate! Thy cruelty has robb’d me of my soul”. Confronted by the murderous Orlando she tells him “I mourn Medoro’s fate, and not my own. Until you cause my blood to flow, enjoy these tears of trickling woe.” If a 19th-century Italian composer had set this libretto to music, the opera probably would have ended with Angelica’s murder… and with Dorinda as the lone mourner. But Handel and his audiences were accustomed to the 18th-century conventions of resolved endings and deus ex machina. Angelica was not murdered after all and Dorinda was mistaken about Medoro’s death. And it increasingly appears that Zoroastro may have been the controlling factor behind the human madness, instigating it to convince Orlando of the folly of love. The magician’s final act is the administration of a potion, delivered from the heavens in a golden vessel by four genii and an eagle, a potion that finally restores Orlando’s wits and erases all his infatuation with Angelica. And in conclusion everyone is invited to Dorinda’s rustic cabin for a party to reconsider the amazing facets of love. — John E. Sawyer N.B. According to the article “Angelica” in Grove Online, the Angelica-Medoro-Orlando story, and the many variations thereof, inspired over 50 operatic settings in the 17th and 18th centuries including those by Peri, Lully, Vivaldi and Haydn. Except for Handel’s Orlando, none were presented in England. www.earlymusic.bc.ca — Handel’s “Orlando” - page 5 — <strong>Vancouver</strong> <strong>Early</strong> <strong>Music</strong> <strong>Festival</strong> <strong>2012</strong>
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