Marc-Antoine Charpentier: David & Jonathas

Beautiful rare French Baroque
Marc-Antoine Charpentier worked for many years in the shadow of the officially appointed court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully and it seems he has remained in his shadow ever since, largely overlooked even as French Baroque music is being rediscovered in modern times with Lully and his successor Rameau being favoured over Charpentier, Campra and the underrated Gossec. There may be genuine musicological reasons for this choice but judging by this rare performance of Charpentier's David et Jonathas for the 2012 Aix-en-Provence Festival - the first staged performance of the work in over 300 years - the problem seems to lie with the difficulty of adapting this kind of work for a modern stage, since musically it really is something of a delight.

First performed in 1688, a year after the death of Lully, David et Jonathas, a "Biblical tragedy in five acts with a prologue" is based on the friendship between David - slayer of Goliath - and Jonathas, son of King Saul. The difficulty...

Exceptional production, terrible DVD.
I'm going to recommend this DVD solely on the grounds that it's apparently the only existing recording of an amazing and engaging production, beautifully sung and presented.

Sadly, however, you don't get a genuine idea of how amazing the production really is from this DVD, which is horribly shot and edited. Two of the most powerful scenes between David and Jonathas are all but ruined by inexplicable editing gaffes (in the first) and cheesy and unnecessary slow-motion (in the second). The scene where Saul consults the Witch of Endor, the highlight of the opera in the live production, is filmed and edited in such a way that it's difficult to get a sense of how the scene is arranged and the disturbing effectiveness is largely lost.

The DVD I have is a pre-release version sold at BAM during the production's run in New York. I suppose I can always hold out hope that the commercial release was re-edited and the worst of the damage mitigated, but I'm not holding my...

Heart-breaking love story
This is an incredibly poignant love story set to incredibly beautiful music, which overwhelms any infelicities of the production, which at times was inexplicable (at least to my eyes), but the singers are all fabulous, the orchestra sounds great and the opera itself is pretty short (under two hours). The New York Times review of the performance of this production at BAM noted how explicitly homoerotic the libretto is and referred to Charpentier as a hitherto unknown pioneer for gay visibility, so if you can't handle men kissing, you shouldn't buy this DVD (even though Jonathan is actually sung by a woman, she's very credibly dressed and made-up as a young man, possibly still a teenager). I cannot recommend this piece highly enough.

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