The soprano Jeanine De Bique confessed to this newspaper that, upon returning from her summer in Salzburg, she felt the need to perform at a festival with less media pressure and in which people "would really come to listen to the music and appreciate the artists ”. And it is what she found yesterday in Torroella de Montgrí, whose audience seemed to bring her heart and her soul – and her long applause – to a very special date with baroque music.
The singer from Trinidad and Tobago made her Spanish recital debut with a curious program with which it must have been possible to distinguish – according to what she said in an effortful Spanish – between the different coloratura techniques used by Händel and his friends in the Baroque period.
He had already performed in Spain: it was at the Liceu a couple of years ago with the mythological opera Platée, by Jean-Philippe Rameau, in a concert version. And she will be seen in Carmen de Bieito next season. But yesterday was his momentum, the occasion to present a program based on his first record, Mirrors, where he explores the arias that both Händel and other eighteenth-century composers had written for the same heroines: Cleopatra, Rodelinda, Alcina, Agrippina.
At that time when the opera became a publishing business, it was the case that the same libretto, with its due modifications, gave rise to different musical versions, all of them in search of success. This fierce competition became evident yesterday with the Caribbean singer combining arias about the same character, inquiring into the polyhedral nature of these historical heroines. The UNESCO ambassador for Peace also displayed all of her vocal skills of baroque bel canto, with an expressive and theatrical timbre and an elegant mastery of vibrato and coloratura.
She was accompanied by Concerto Köln, a group that has spent thirty years interpreting a baroque repertoire heard a thousand times in a very fresh way. With them, an aria from Carl-Heinrich Graun's Rodelindaregina de' Longobardi, “Risolvere non oso”, was allowed to be premiered in Spain. This was followed by the much better known “Ritorna o caro” from Händel's. An emotional range for Rodelinda, which may not be as wide as that of Alcina and Cleopatra, but it has great depth, as the heroine of 7th-century Milan remains faithful to the memory of her husband, King Bertarido, and he rejects Duke Grimoaldo who has usurped power from him.
After two beautiful arias from Alcina – in which Händel amply demonstrates why he was invincible in the commercial duel with his colleagues – De Bique also faced off with applause for Händel's Agrippina (“L'alma mia frà le tempeste”) against Telemann's at the opera Germanicas (“Rimembranza crudel”), because if the first one composed 35 operas, this one surpassed him with 40. And he approached the end by again comparing Händel and Graun in the character of Cleopatra: that of Giulio Cesare in Egitto and that of Cleopatra and Caesar.
Generous with the public, the encore batch began with Il trionfo del tempo. by Händel, to be enlivened by brilliant colors and end by repeating the “Tra le procelle assorto” by Cleopatra and Cesare amid cheers. "Thanks to the Torroella festival for its support of the baroque", she added in an evening of great beauty.
