Featuring countertenor Randall Scotting and tenor Jorge Navarro Colorado, comes the album Infinite Refrain, Music of Love’s Refuge offers a focus on queer relationships and gay love in 17th-century Venice. They collaborate with the Academy of Ancient Music, led by conductor Laurence Cummings, to perform a program celebrating Venice as a place of unusual tolerance in the Baroque era. Infinite Refrain is framed as the journey of two men in love and tells its story through 17th-century music.
“Ironically, it was Venice’s decline as a trading powerhouse that led to its reputation as a Mecca for gay tourism,” writes Clive Paget in the excellent liner notes. “The annual Carnival, with its frenzy of sexual licence and promise of anonymity, had always drawn the crowds, but with the downturn in commercial revenue the authorities were increasingly inclined to turn a blind eye in exchange for a healthy injection of the 17th-century version of the pink pound. And so, something that had been swept under the carpet for over a century became something the Venetians could sell.”
“Onstage in the 1600s, people were playing different genders than they represented in their everyday life,” explains Scotting. “Men were wearing dresses, women were often in men’s suits, male castrati were singing in high voices… so many things were fluid about opera and music at this time.” Navarro Colorado adds: “Many of the duets on the album were also composed to be purposely ambiguous in terms of gender and allowing for queer interpretations so that whoever is listening will feel connected to their message of love.”
Alongside duets by Monteverdi and Cavalli are contemporary premieres of music by little-known composers Boretti, Melani, and Castrovillari, including an impassioned love duet for the mythic lovers Hercules and Theseus — “Se per tè lieto mi lice” (“To be happy for you is precious to me”). “This duet portrays two of the greatest heroes of Greek antiquity matter-of-factly proclaiming their love for each other and it is offered here just as Venetian audiences would have heard it in 1670,” says Scotting.
Filed under: Baroque opera, gay, Venice
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 