Instead of writing pastiche Renaissance polyphony, Finsterer’s score recreates the Renaissance soundscape with modern musical codes using inventive instruments, scattered modernist textures, and instrumental figures such as those used by minimalist Michael Nyman to animate and transform the glittering vowel sounds and sometimes undermined by an outstanding cast of singers.
His musically most interesting elements are Finsterer’s ear for original, dramatically suitable instrumental and vocal combinations and the way in which musical processes overlap with mathematical processes in a collision of the sensual and the rational.
Although the story lingers in the realm of the mind, there is an instinct for telling and refreshing the dramatic tone at key moments with new sounds and situations.
The opening scene, Horoscope, creates a captivating and imposing opening with gongs, beautifully rimmed, matching vocal harmony and chaotic splashes of color from the instruments.
In Scene VIII, Lock of Combinations, the choir “explains” the math behind Cardano’s invention of the combination lock in textures that spin like intersecting balls.
For the last scene Finsterer recreates a renaissance dance with loud woodwinds and drum intrusions, like a grimly realistic dance of death.
Mitchell Butel, in the spoken part of Cardano, creates a sharp, dark, and deeply thoughtful person of ambitious intellect who seeks to survive in a world tense between the intrigues of the Machiavelli Age and the superstitions of the Inquisition.
Soprano Jane Sheldon as his mother sings with concentrated convulsive expression of his caesarean birth in a plague year, reinterpreting the arioso styles of the Renaissance and early Baroque, while Jessica O’Donoghue creates a parallel moment of expressiveness as his daughter dies of syphilis.
The third take on the fate of women goes to the mezzo-soprano Anna Fraser, who was poisoned by her son Giambattista. Simon Lobelson sings in this role and as a sick archbishop with firm suppleness, while the tenor Andrew Goodwin as kleptomaniac other son Aldo maintains a purely expressive tonal evenness.
Janice Muller’s direction is simple, direct, and effectively lit by Matt Cox. The AV mix could have tolerated more margin in the amplified spoken word to cut through the swirling musical sounds that always threaten to overwhelm their rationality.
Conductor Jack Symonds controlled the balance between dazzling purity and gritty noise in the sound to create an acoustic equivalent reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s image of a person lying in the gutter staring at the stars.
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