Though not a complete stranger to New York City, André Campra's greatest stage hit, Les Fêtes Vénitiennes, received a vividly Dionysian production in one of Les Arts Florissants's more sophisticated exports, this one from Paris' Opera Comique to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The genre, actually, was opera-ballet, a series of one-act operas that heavily involved dance, and this one dates from 1710. Campra's work, which was presented as four sections, breaths similar air as Molière with a greater sense of vaudeville comedy, the dance element being concentrated more around the celebratory conclusion than interrupting the plot.
Musically, Les Fêtes Vénitiennes shows a different side of Campra (1660-1744) than his Requiem that has kept his name alive over the centuries or lyric-tragedies such as Tancrède that are now being discovered. Whatever the genre, Campra has greater dramatic depth and musical invention than Lully, as well as an unfussy directness of expression that makes up for lacking the lyrical gifts of Charpentier and experimental flights of Rameau. As seen on Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy, the overall package approximated the visual feast that 18th-century audiences would've expected: the customary French Baroque prologue had a huge carnival puppet amid allegorical characters such as Reason (dressed as a nun) being banished from a stage, designed by Radu Boruzescu with sexy reds and nocturnal blues.
Conceptually, the Robert Carsen production sought to bridge the 18th and 21st centuries, first with modern-dressed tourists changing into archaic clothes on stage, and then by maintaining a velocity of stage activity that mostly reflected the director's typical theatrical thoughtfulness but sometimes lapsed into overkill. Such moments provided effective comedy but also distracted friom beautiful music not often heard around these parts. Les Arts Florissants founder/conductor William Christie doesn't seem to mind theatrical distractions so much: In years past, he presided over a production of Rameau's Les Paladins that employed a flood of computer graphics, as he clearly didn't trust the music's ability to hold our attention.
The "Serenades and Gamblers" section concerned a Venetian swain three-timing a trio of women, inspiring comic female rivalry, but also some of Campra's best music in the nocturnal exchanges between the serenaded (Rachel Redmond) and the serenader (Francois Lis), the latter facing unfortunate visual competition from a number of choreographed gondoliers with miniature boats built into their costumes. The final celebratory dancing concerned the allegorical Fortune, represented by a singer dressed as a roulette wheel — all terribly clever — with Ed Wubbe's highly animated choreography. But Wubbe had already lost my loyalty with his sexy gondoliers and did so again with some clownish sheep that were to come.
"The Opera" was sort of a comic fore-runner to I Pagliacci with real-life intrigues taking place amid an opera performance with a stock pastoral plot. The leading lady (welcomely sung by Redmond) was willingly abducted by the deus-ex-machina god of wind (Jonathan McGovern) coming down from the ceiling and creating enough distraction to steal her away. The star of this section was tenor Reinoud van Mechelen, who has all you could want: voice, Gallic tone, lively use of words and charismatic presence.
One reason that Christie walks on water for many (besides that fact that he rescued the world of French Baroque from the kind of clueless, haphazard performances of the repertoire that preceded him) is his way of discovering marvelous singers who illustrate how the European early-music community has some of the best vocal performances of our era. The high tenor Cyril Auvity, who has an international recording profile, was on hand for some luxury casting of smaller roles in Les Fêtes Vénitiennes. However, Christie favors sopranos who tend to sound alike (however pretty and elegant those voices may be) and gives so much attention to surface polish that you can't always hear what's beneath. Of course, he also effectively accentuates coloristic shifts in the instrumental writing so that even recitatives are kaleidoscopes for the ears. But the fact that he's not the last word in pieces like this means that there's plenty of room for others to explore this still vast, uncharted regions of the French Baroque.