NEW YORK (AP) — Call it a pastiche. Or a Baroque fantasy in two acts. Or the best opera Handel and Vivaldi never wrote.
By any name, “The Enchanted Island,” which had its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on New Year’s Eve with an all-star cast, is irresistibly entertaining. It’s a light-hearted romp with enough fizz to send a dozen Champagne corks popping, and its only serious drawback is that at 3½ hours running time it serves up a bit too much of a good thing.
The concoction was the brainchild of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager who wanted to expand the company’s Baroque repertory in a way that would create a stir and draw in new audiences. So he reinvented a 300-year-old gimmick, the “pasticcio” in which already existing music by several composers was fitted to a new libretto and plot.
Baroque specialist William Christie was engaged to oversee the musical preparation and conduct, and writer/director Jeremy Sams crafted the libretto. It was his clever idea to combine two Shakespeare plots: The quartet of lovers from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” get shipwrecked on Prospero’s island from “The Tempest”; a major outbreak of mistaken identity ensues, and it takes all manner
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