For most Georgian concertgoers, the name Antonio Vivaldi evokes a familiar image: bright violin concertos, rhythmic sunshine, the endlessly recycled motor of The Four Seasons. The theatrical Vivaldi, the composer who wrote nearly 50 operas for the volatile stages of early eighteenth-century Venice, remains almost invisible in Georgia.
Which makes the recent appearance of Ottone in Villa in Tbilisi feel quietly historic. The opera, presented by the Tbilisi State Chamber Orchestra Georgian Sinfonietta on the Small Stage of the Rustaveli National Theater, marks the first attempt in Georgia to stage a Baroque opera in something approaching its original sonic conditions: historical instruments, continuo ensemble, singers trained in the stylistic grammar of early eighteenth-century vocal rhetoric. In other words, a whole musical ecosystem that Georgian audiences almost never encounter.
The setting could hardly have been more appropriate. The Rustaveli Theater’s small hall, with its compact proportions and shallow stage, resembles the intimate Italian opera houses of the early 1700s far more closely than the grand opera stages Georgians usually associate with the genre. In Vicenza, where the opera premiered in 1713, audiences experienced the work in spaces that functioned almost like salons: rooms where music circulated between performers and listeners with very little distance. Something similar happened here.
The Young Vivaldi at Work
Ottone in Villa belongs to Vivaldi’s earliest operatic experiments. The score still carries the restless curiosity of a composer discovering theater. One hears flashes of the musical language that would later dominate Venetian opera: sudden rhythmic propulsion, instrumental color used almost pictorially, arias that sculpt emotional states with obsessive clarity.
The plot, imperial intrigue in the Roman world, moves through a familiar Baroque mechanism of disguises, jealousies, and reversals. Yet the real drama unfolds in the music.
Baroque opera treats emotion differently from the nineteenth-century repertoire. Rather than unfolding psychological narratives, the music isolates individual affects and examines them from multiple angles. Each aria becomes a kind of emotional chamber where a single feeling—desire, rage, melancholy—circulates, intensifies, decorates itself with ornament. In performance this structure can feel hypnotic.
The countertenor Maximiliano Danta, singing the title role, brought a vocal color that Georgian audiences rarely encounter in opera houses still dominated by Romantic repertoire. The countertenor voice occupies a curious acoustic territory: light, flexible, slightly metallic at the edges. In Baroque opera, it replaces the heroic castrato voices for which many of these roles were originally written.
Danta approached the role with a rhetorical intelligence that suits the style. His phrasing treated the vocal line less as lyrical expansion and more as speech elevated into music. Cadences arrived like carefully placed commas. Ornamentation functioned as expressive punctuation rather than virtuoso display.
Opposite him, Paola Valentina Molinari’s Cleonilla supplied the opera’s emotional volatility. Vivaldi writes her arias with an almost violinistic agility: rapid passagework, quick leaps between registers, rhythmic patterns that resemble instrumental figurations. Molinari handled these passages with an appealing theatrical impatience; the character’s impulsive psychology appeared directly in the music’s quicksilver movement.
The Georgian soprano Tamar Tsirekidze, singing Caio, offered a contrasting presence: a voice centered on clarity of line and controlled phrasing. In Baroque opera, such contrasts become structural elements of the drama. Each character carries a distinctive musical temperament.
The Quiet Engine of the Orchestra
The real revelation of the evening, however, came from the pit. Baroque opera depends on the continuo group: a small harmonic engine that supports the singers and shapes the rhythm of the drama. In this production, the continuo included theorbo, harpsichord, cello, and bassoon, played by a group of internationally respected specialists: Diego Cantalupi on theorbo, Gabriele Levi at the keyboard, the bassoonist Sergio Azzolini, and the cellist Sophie Lamberbourg.
To listeners accustomed to modern orchestras, this sound world feels almost startling in its transparency. The theorbo—its elongated neck stretching improbably above the ensemble—produces chords that bloom slowly, like soft shadows spreading across the harmony. The harpsichord adds a brittle brightness, each note articulated with crystalline precision. Bassoon and cello weave a darker harmonic thread beneath the singers. Together they create a texture that breathes with the singers rather than surrounding them.
In Vivaldi’s arias the orchestra often functions like an extension of the vocal line. Strings echo melodic fragments, winds supply brief flashes of color, rhythmic figures pulse beneath the surface. The Georgian Sinfonietta navigated this texture with admirable stylistic flexibility. Baroque articulation demands a different physical approach from modern symphonic playing—shorter bow strokes, lighter attacks, rhythmic elasticity.
The staging by the Italian director Ilaria Sainato, assisted by Tata Popiashvili, embraced a principle that Baroque theater understood instinctively: drama emerges through spatial relationships. Characters approached, retreated, circled each other with choreographic clarity. Emotional tensions appeared almost diagrammatic. When jealousy entered the scene, the stage geometry shifted. Alliances formed and dissolved through movement across the space.
This visual clarity suits Baroque dramaturgy. The music itself often functions like architecture: balanced, symmetrical, carefully proportioned. The staging simply translated those musical proportions into physical space.
A Late Arrival, A Necessary One
For Georgian musical life, the arrival of a production like this represents something larger than a successful evening at the theater. Georgia’s classical music culture developed primarily through the nineteenth-century repertoire—opera, Romantic symphonies, the monumental piano literature that still dominates conservatory training. These traditions remain powerful and beloved.
The Baroque repertoire belongs to a different musical universe. Its aesthetics emphasize rhetoric, articulation, and stylistic precision rather than sheer vocal amplitude or orchestral mass. Introducing this world into the Georgian context changes the palette available to performers and listeners alike.
Over the past decade, early music has slowly begun to appear across the country’s festivals and concert halls. Small ensembles experiment with historical instruments. Conservatory students encounter new repertoires. International collaborations bring specialists from Europe into dialogue with Georgian musicians. “Ottone in Villa” belongs to this gradual cultural shift.
Opera history has a curious sense of geography. Works that once circulated between Venetian theaters now appear centuries later in cities that their composers could never have imagined visiting. Standing inside the Rustaveli theater’s small hall, listening to Vivaldi’s youthful score unfold with theorbo and harpsichord glimmering beneath the voices, one felt the quiet pleasure of historical coincidence. The music sounded perfectly at home in this intimate space.
Three hundred years is a long delay for a premiere. Yet some works arrive exactly when a city is ready to hear them.
By Ivan Nechaev
