Spare a thought for Georg Philipp Telemann. Friend to Bach and Handel, and godfather to Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, he penned more than 3,000 works including 29 extant operas. Yet, for all his fecundity of invention and consistent quality, we hear his sparkling music far less often than he deserves. If people are unsure where to begin, how about Pimpinone?
First performed 300 years ago in Hamburg, its three acts were intended as comic intermezzi for a production of Handel’s opera seria Tamerlano (total running time a gruelling five hours!) With an easy to follow plot and laugh-out-loud musical numbers, it would have come as welcome light relief, assuming people stuck around to listen.
The Royal Ballet and Opera’s staging, with singers, conductor and director drawn from its Jette Parker Artists programme, reveals a work that’s on the slight side, but one with plenty of charm and sexual politics not a million miles from our own time, hence its interest beyond the recording studio.
The work is subtitled “The Unequal Marriage Between Vespetta and Pimpinone or The Domineering Chambermaid”, which pretty much sums it up. In Act I, working-class Vespetta – the name means little wasp – lands a job as housemaid to Pimpinone. Gifts aside, by Act II she’s ready to quit until he offers to marry her. In Act III, after much comic quarrelling, he grudgingly grants her some genuine freedoms.
Sophie Gilpin sets it in the 1960s, bringing a modern slant to issues of equality and female emancipation. It works well. Vespetta is first discovered performing as part of a festive bash at Pimpinone’s pad. With lights and tinsel, she’s literally done up like a Christmas tree (witty set and costumes by Anna Yates). Isabela Díaz has great fun with her lively opening aria, slipping into flats to soothe sore feet. A playful actor, her bright soprano with attractive upper extension does the rest. Pay rises, prenups and miniskirts attend her shimmying up the greasy pole of social mobility, and we root for her all the way.
Grisha Martirosyan is her nice-but-dim Pimpinone complete with porn tash and dubious taste in multicoloured shirts. His thrusting baritone has depth and power at the top, and he’s funny too, especially in the panting syncopations of his hot-to-trot opening aria. Later on, he reveals a nice line in comedy falsetto, while Díaz shows off her nimble technique in a pair of teasing vocal minuets (though both might have sung more softly at times).
Peggy Wu conducts a crisp performance with players drawn from the English National Opera Orchestra. Continuo pickups might have been quicker off the mark and more imaginatively decorated, but otherwise her approach, like Gilpin’s, allows Telemann’s neatly revived confection to shine.
At Linbury theatre, London, until 17 May