SSunday evening at the Frankfurt Opera: Handel’s “Orlando”. Just before the performance begins: a speech to the audience. That fears a singer has caught a cold. But that’s not it, the speech is about the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the needy there and the desire of the opera to collect money for them. Applause. Then the game begins about the passion-crazed war hero Orlando, who loves a woman who doesn’t love him back, which is why he hates his more successful rival, who in turn is being wooed in vain by a shepherdess in the laurel grove. Girl doesn’t meet boy, who therefore suffers a baroque loss of control, traversing the imagined heaven of love like hell of jealousy and a hallucinated world of shadows.
In the end, the only lucky ones are dead, but then come back to life again: the bass-baritone works true theatrical miracles. All with Italian singing. It comes from five performers, one of whom performs better than the other. In the title role, Zanda Švēde sings Orlando’s suffering more desperately into his soul than out of it. One would like to kneel down in front of Monika Buczkowska as a suffering child of nature, who keeps calling herself back to irony and reason with a voice that carries, even flies, over all moods, one would like to kneel down, if that were only possible in the Frankfurt arena. Christopher Lowrey bears it as a sensitive, vulnerable countertenor with composure when the audience then has to laugh when the love madness ascribes a beautiful figure to him.
Kateryna Kasper is Angelica, bossy, submissive, scared, in love – you can’t imagine an emotion that she couldn’t make vocally plausible. We have already said of Božidar Smiljanić that as Maître du Malaise he is able to wake the dead. Thoroughly happy, we step out into the foyer of the Frankfurt Opera without stopping at the cloakroom, where the donations for the Turkish and Syrian emergency areas are collected at the exit. From Orlando! how? Zanda Švēde holds the top hat out to us. She sang for almost three hours. Until the last picture of the opera she was on stage, that is, just a moment ago. She rushed from there to the opera exit faster than we did, even flew. We are completely taken aback, stutter, perplexed by this soul, admiration and thanks. Although we actually should have sung them now.