Orontea Antonio Cesti

Pinchgut Opera 2022

“We explore the beautiful buffet of sexual possibilities in the opera,” he says. “It’s about the overwhelming power of lust and what it does to the human animal.” For Costi there is also the added dynamic that librettist Giacinto Andrea Cicognini gives much more prominence to the lower-class characters, a radical move for the time. “We find that the servants and pages behave in a more appropriate, mature way than the people at the top,” he says. “That was shocking and scandalous and was a refreshing way of looking at humanity that wasn’t really seen before in his period.” Much thought went into the stage design, which is anything but traditional. “It’s set in Egypt, and we’re like: ‘What the hell does Egypt mean?’ We’re not going to put pyramids on stage, so we have this delicious, trashy Egypt-cum-Las-Vegas feeling to the whole thing. We’re pushing for theatricality, colour and exaggeration. There are recognisable tropes of human beings pushed to a cartoonish level.”

Interview Sydney Morning Herald