Lowery and Hosseinpour’s storybook staging of Orlando Paladino at Berlin’s Staatsoper © Ruth Walz 2009

Directors Nigel Lowery and Amir Hosseinpour joined forces with René Jacobs for Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s new production of the Haydn rarity Orlando Paladino, which had its premiere at the house on May 8. The event marked a reunion for the two directors and Jacobs, who collaborated on last season’s premiere of Telemann’s Der Geduldige Sokrates. (Like Orlando, the Telemann staging was a coproduction with the Innsbruck Early Music Festival.)

Once among the most popular of Haydn’s operas, Orlando is an intriguing mix of opera seria and opera buffa elements that brings to mind Don Giovanni, which it predates by five years. The libretto, based on an episode from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (the source material for countless other operas), tells of the paladin Orlando’s fury on discovering that his love, Angelica, queen of Cathay, has eloped with Medoro. While the lovers hide in a nearby castle, the king, Rodomonte — also infatuated with Angelica — pursues Orlando across the countryside and enlists the aid of the shepherdess Eurilla, who falls for Orlando’s squire, Pasquale. After much antic confusion involving the warring rivals and wild savages, the sorceress Alcina sets everything right by erasing Orlando’s memory of Angelica.

Orlando is an ensemble piece, and the Staatsoper gathered a persuasive cast of players that sounded superb both in the showy arias and en masse. German soprano Marlis Petersen was not an obvious choice for the noble, suffering Angelica. Her visceral performance and earthy voice might have struck a purist as out of place in a Haydn opera. But her dizzying coloratura was put to good use here, and her huskier tones enhanced the parlando writing, which she dispatched with judicious rubato. Her soulful account of “Aure chete,” a two-tempo rondo with oboe obbligato, was one of the evening’s high points.

The women surrounding her were equally impressive. The South Korean soprano Sunhae Im was a sprightly and adorable Eurilla. The petite singer twirled, pantomimed and whistled her way through this playful role with seemingly inexhaustible zeal. She sculpted her phrases beautifully, with agile, buoyant phrasing. Bulgarian soprano Alexandrina Pendatchanska made a spine-tingling Alcina, with her rich low register and even vibrato.

As for the men, Norwegian tenor Magnus Staveland was fully committed as the wishy-washy Medoro. He sang heroically, with precision and creamy texture. Italian baritone Pietro Spagnoli was likewise impassioned as Rodomonte, here dressed in full pirate regalia, but his singing was rough in patches and occasionally lacked finesse. Victor Torres, an impressive Argentine baritone, was charismatic as the Leporello-like Pasquale. He brought careful phrasing and warmth to his patter songs and love duets with Eurilla and earned laughter for his comical falsetto.

In the surprisingly small title role of Orlando, Tom Randle performed with full force. His searing tenor was well suited to the role of the mad knight, even if his lyric urgency often turned hysterical — an understandable turn of events, considering that he was directed to run around manically with an axe for a good part of the evening. Not surprisingly, Randle regained composure and control in the final act after Orlando’s rehabilitation, singing with heroic plangency.

The production’s storybook staging hardly succeeded in breathing life into the libretto’s one-dimensional characters. Much of the flavor of last season’s Sokrates was in evidence, especially in the deadpan slapstick, pantomime and heightened artifice of the sets. But this Orlando lacked any genuine stylistic and thematic coherence: it was a Monty Pythonesque collage of fairy tale, absurdist drama and cartoon. The mise-en-scène included a troupe of dancing savages in gray beards, a creaky castle, incongruous costumes and a giant pair of scissors that Alcina — so far as I could tell — used to lobotomize Orlando. Even if one admits that Haydn was somewhat unsure of how to integrate the buffa and seria styles in this opera, Lowery and Hosseinpour still failed the piece by sidestepping that ambivalence entirely in a staging that — however colorful and spirited — soon grew tiresome and frequently verged on the ridiculous.

Luckily, the lack of directorial clarity never seeped into the orchestra pit, where Jacobs led the Freiburger Barockorchester in his own performing version of the score. Among early-music specialists, the Freiburg musicians are known for performances that are both historically accurate and fresh. All evening long, they gave a polished performance that combined elegance and playfulness. In their hands, the music sounded alive, unpredictable and surprisingly flexible, perhaps nowhere more so than in the supple work of the very busy continuo, particularly the dazzling improvisations of the cembalo.

A. J. GOLDMANN