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ENSEMBLE INFO

Ensemble Contact:

Email:

development@vachebaroque.com

2020

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This project is a new, historically informed staging of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (1625), recognised as the first known opera by a female composer. Written for the Medici court, it blends humour, fantasy, and political edge, with enchanted plants and monsters, sea gods, rival sorceresses, and a hero who is anything but steadfast. Sung in Italian with English side-titles, this 1 hour 45 minute production (including interval) will be performed by the Vache Baroque Band on period instruments under the musical direction of Jonathan Darbourne and directed by Eloise Lally.
The cast features outstanding UK-based singers: Camilla Seale (Alcina), Jon Stainsby (Ruggiero), Phoebe Rayner (Melissa), Filippo Turkheimer (Nettuno), Harriet Burns (Sirena), Betty Makharinsky (Nunzia), Aina Miyagi Magnell (Una Damigella), and Tom Kelly (Pastore/Astolfo). The Vache Baroque Band is led by early seventeenth-century specialist Mayah Kadish, following her acclaimed collaboration with Vache Baroque in Rossi400 at Smith Square (December 2022). The creative team includes designer Zahra Mansouri, lighting designer Alex Musgrave, and movement director Katie Kelly, who will incorporate stylised baroque-inspired gesture and dance, including a playful reimagining of the original “horse ballet” finale.

The Vache Baroque Band is a flexible ensemble of leading period-instrument specialists with deep experience in early seventeenth-century Italian repertoire. Their expertise in historical performance practice—from improvised ornamentation to continuo realisation and rhetorically responsive tempo—will unlock Caccini’s text-driven musical language. With a bespoke mix of strings, winds, brass, and continuo, Jonathan Darbourne will shape an agile, chamber-like sound world that shifts between intimate recitative, madrigalian choruses, and incisive dances, ensuring the score feels theatrically alive rather than museum-like.

Caccini’s score, with libretto by Ferdinando Saracinelli after Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, aligns with the Continuo Foundation’s mission to champion rarely heard baroque repertoire and broaden the canon. Influenced by her father Giulio Caccini’s “spoken” style of sung poetry, her recitativo writing combines craft with dramatic immediacy. Text-led passages flow into choral textures and arias, while virtuosic ornamentation challenges and showcases the singers in dialogue with the band.

Close collaboration between musical director, director, movement director, cast, and players places ensemble responsiveness at the heart of the staging, using flexible continuo scoring and spatialised instrumental groupings to heighten drama and make musical rhetoric visible and audible.

A partnership with Buxton International Festival ensures a high-impact run at the Pavilion Arts Centre (four performances in one week), supporting audience development, artist sustainability, and the re-centering of Caccini’s opera within the early-music canon.

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