Pimpinone and Serpetta, photo © Camilla Greenwell
A maidservant on the make and her foolish-fond employer – you barely need to fill in the details. But in Pimpinone Telemann takes a classic operatic gambit and pours so much musical verve, invention and heart into the slenderest of plots that it feels absolutely fresh. Originally conceived as an intermezzo – a little light-relief between the acts of Handel’s dynastic tragedy Tamerlano – it stands surprisingly sturdily on its own dainty feet: a palate-cleanser in search of an upgrade.
And it gets the full three-course treatment from director Sophie Gilpin and her fellow Jette Parker Young Artists, who pull off a coup with this deliciously observed social comedy. Movements from Telemann’s own Sinfonia Spirituosa supply overture and interludes between three acts that offer snapshots through time of Pimpinone’s relationship with his maid – later wife and mother of his child – Vespetta. Freed from extraneous exposition and the padding of sub-plots, these episodes can dive straight into the emotional meat of the matter – opera’s answer to 5×2 or Two For The Road (with a few more laughs).
Anna Yates’ designs play a long game with the audience, who enter to a set that’s all band-box striped wallpaper and sconces. But this isn’t the 18th-century anymore, and emancipation and the battle of the sexes bursts into the decorous framework with rebellious 1960s energy. It’s a smart update, and while I’m not sure Telemann’s original really does “grapple with profound issues of power, class and gender” as Gilpin argues, her update does an elegant job of it without losing the light-footed charm that’s the opera’s heart.
With just two characters (neither of whom is alone on stage at any point in this staging) there are limited moves and situations available – proposition, rejection, acceptance, conflict, resolution – but Gilpin and her cast create a sincerity of emotion that carries the action through its contrived situations with easy flow, and 90 minutes whips past.
photo © Camilla Greenwell
It helps that, in soprano Isabela Díaz and baritone Grisha Martirosyan, she has two very game singing-actors. Martirosyan seizes the comic potential of the vain, feckless, Pucci-printed Pimpinone – on the hunt from the get-to go for his very own “Pim Pim Pim Pimpinina”. (The Papageno similarities don’t end here). He struts, dances and gurns, and turns a glove-puppet parrot into a falsetto show-stopper, oozing hangdog charisma all the while. But there’s a core of truth to it all that turns a divertissement into something more tender – the happy ending earned not contrived.
Díaz invests Vespetta’s mercurial mood-shifts and outbursts with plenty of energy: a skittish heifer in Pimpinone’s bachelor china shop, and a Norina in the making. But there’s vulnerability too, and if her phrasing sometimes lacks line, she finds plenty of colour and sweetness in Telemann’s arias and duets. Martirosyan’s open, warm baritone shines in his arias, but it’s in the expressive possibilities of the rectiatives – the exaggeration and distortion, the use of text and inflection – that he comes into his own.
JPA conductor Peggy Wu draws some sensitive period playing from a reduced selection of the ENO Orchestra, supplemented by Eligio Quinteiro’s stylish theorbo and baroque guitar: the engine of Telemann’s drama – an intermezzo no more, but very much the main event.