Cecilia Bartoli is now weaving intrigues as a web designer

When Cecilia Bartoli released "The Vivaldi Album" in 1999, she not only laid the foundation for her international career as a singer, but also drew attention to a composer who, until then, had been known almost exclusively for "The Four Seasons." The following year, the encyclopedic Vivaldi edition began production on the Naïve label, and in 2018, Bartoli followed up with another album. Since then, none of Vivaldi's numerous operas has truly established itself on stage.

Perhaps, as director Barrie Kosky says in the program booklet for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, he "lacked the dramatic instinct" of someone like George Frideric Handel at the same time. He nevertheless wrote music that appealed to the stage, especially magnificent arias; in the Baroque period, he was the jewels in the pearl necklace of an often interchangeable libretto. So why not craft a new necklace from the jewels themselves, one that meets the dramatic expectations of the present?

Bartoli has now commissioned Barrie Kosky, artistic director of the Whitsun Festival, whose operas and concerts she has dedicated to a different theme each year since 2012. After Venice, this time the festival will be held at Vivaldi's main place of work. The opening production will be hosted by the Salzburg Summer Festival, which begins in just over five weeks, with ticket prices of up to almost five hundred euros. Bartoli has already ventured into some lesser-known titles, but "Hotel Metamorphosis" takes the venture to a new level.

The evening at the Haus für Mozart takes its name from the Roman poet Ovid's "Metamorphoses," a collection of myths that all end with a transformation and have shaped the entire history of European art, not least opera. Kosky retells five of them – with only four singers and with 81-year-old acting legend Angela Winkler, who recites Ovid's texts as Orpheus.

In addition to Bartoli himself as Eurydice and Arachne, two other mezzo-sopranos can be heard: Lea Desandre, like Bartoli a Zurich audience favorite, portrays the nymph Echo, unhappily in love with Narcissus, and Myrrha, who desires her own father, with a silvery, rounded voice. Nadezhda Karyazina, a former ensemble member at the opera house and previously celebrated at the Salzburg Easter Festival as Marfa in Mussorgsky's "Khovanshchina," gives Minerva and Juno a truly divine form with a darker tone. Countertenor Philippe Jaroussky transforms from the artist Pygmalion into the already aging Narcissus.

They all experience the archaic myths in a modern, transformative setting designed by Michael Levine: a hotel room. Depending on the subject, only the painting above the bed, which has dangerous powers, changes. At the beginning, it draws Eurydice into the underworld; later, the minibar spits out myrrh in the form of a tree. There is plenty else to see during the four-hour performance, typical of Baroque operas. This is ensured by the choir Il Canto di Orfeo, various doubles, and the dance troupe, fueled by Otto Pichler, whose members, among others, descend upon the room as Maenads. And to be heard, too: arias from a wide variety of Vivaldi operas, selected by Kosky together with dramaturge Olaf A. Schmitt, and, thankfully, there are also more ensembles and choirs than usual in Baroque operas.

The Musiciens du Prince – Monaco, founded in 2016 on Bartoli's initiative, will also be performing. They sound unusually rich by the standards of historical performance practice, sometimes drowning out the singers in the hall's overly present acoustics. The original sound from the pit is sensual and creamy, but at times also powerfully harsh, because the interplay is not oriented towards metrical precision, but rather, historically accurately, towards a culture of small tempo shifts between the instruments. In general, conductor Gianluca Capuano allows the music to play in a fascinatingly free manner, especially in the instrumental solos, which Vivaldi often adds to the vocals. Kosky also uses excerpts from Vivaldi concertos as incidental music, which again meets contemporary listening expectations.

The project is not without precedents: Baroque operas that are newly combined from existing music have always been called pasticcio—after the Italian word for pasty. Such combinations are currently being increasingly programmed by opera houses, probably in response to weariness with the canon on the one hand, and with the now well-trodden interpretive paths of the director's theater on the other. At the Salzburg Summer Festival, for example, director Peter Sellars will combine a monodrama by Arnold Schoenberg with an excerpt from Mahler's "Song of the Earth."

Something like this requires a keen sense of scenic rhythm and visual effects. Kosky, not without reason in demand worldwide as an opera director, has both. He translates the myths into contemporary visual worlds: Bartoli, as Arachne, is not a web artist, but rather a web designer, who competes with Minerva to "morph" artificial visual worlds (Rocafilm) before being transported into virtual space as a spider herself. The self-absorbed Narcissus finds himself between two twins moving in mirror images. It's cruel, disturbing, yet light-hearted, at times even comical, and it perceptibly transports Ovid's two-thousand-year-old tone into the present. Even if Angela Winkler has to deliver a somewhat trivial prose translation with microphone amplification – instead of the classical hexameters, which would have been better suited to her girlishly artificial speaking style.

That Orpheus, of all people, speaks rather than sings is an ironic twist, yet it nevertheless frames the opera's primal myth as a framework for the evening. At the end, the lightless abyss of the underworld opens up beneath the hotel room, populated by figures with the heads of bony birds. Bartoli, as Eurydice, kisses the head that the Maenads tore off Orpheus, while singing the quarter-hour aria "Gelido in ogni vena" from "Farnace," on one of those delicate vocal silver threads with which she has always ensnared her audience. If the frenetic final applause is to be believed, then with this production she has once again achieved groundbreaking results for the reception of Vivaldi, both as festival director and as a singer.