It would not be surprising if Martin Scorsese had based Taxi Driver on the myth of Orlando, which Ludovico Ariosto gave birth to in the Italian Renaissance with the famous chivalric poem Orlando Furioso, moving forward to modern psychology and the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in soldiers. The protagonist of it was that war veteran who returned disturbed from the horrors of the battle between Saracens and Christian Charlemagneists. That Orlando without social skills and with one foot in madness and the other in misanthropy reappeared four centuries later doing the taxi in New York and in the punk skin of Robert De Niro.
This is what Joan Matabosch, artistic director of the Teatro Real, suggests when he defends the logic of this new dramaturgical pirouette that the Madrid lyrical coliseum makes when producing this Orlando by Händel that premiered this Tuesday with a very good reaction from the public. In its final five minutes of applause there was a vain attempt to boo the regista, Claus Guth, who dared to place the protagonist in contemporary times. Specifically, in a thunderous apartment block in a tropical town – perhaps Miami? – whose mobile café at street level is run by a naive young woman with cheer leader pom-poms, and through whose corridors a social worker (Zoroaster), a drunken vagabond, wanders. who, in effect, tries to prevent the deranged soldier from arming her.
Machine gun in hand, this Orlando with a Rambo look walks around well armed – without any shots being heard, luckily –, ready to set everything on fire with a can of gasoline in response to Angelica's heartbreak. His former girlfriend is terrified of harassment and plans to run away with a new love, Medoro, who is also Dorinda, the girl in the caravan.
Handel used these five characters to compose an opera in 1719 that musically honors madness, allowing it to penetrate the score and shake the structure of serious opera, the one that in the Baroque guaranteed that the lovers would eventually recover their love. sanity by his own power and not by an external angel. That revolution that was not completely understood in its time – it was not premiered until 1733 – was defended on Tuesday by Ivor Bolton from the Real's podium with historicist criteria, although with modern instruments...
With the pitch at 442, the abilities of some singers diminished. The divine Anna Prohaska (Angelica) shone more for her acting than for the consistency of her tuning; countertenor Christophe Dumaux (Orlando) started off projecting nowhere, although he corrected and was convincing with his outbursts of anger, especially when holding the gasoline and a lighter shook the work's happy ending: will madness win?
For musicality and vocal beauty – which is what sustains the three hours of a baroque opera – those of the soprano Giulia Semenzato (fabulous Dorinda) and the bass-baritone Florian Boesch (Zoroaster). The flat vocality of countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (Medoro) undoubtedly finds greater success in contemporary opera.
