In what is, as far as I am concerned, a first, the filmmaker Frédéric Savoir has managed to capture an opera performance on camera and transmit the experience to a film audience. It’s a big claim, but Savoir’s treatment of the celebrated baroque orchestra Les Arts Florissants’ performance of Handel’s opera Ariodante made me feel as close as I could get to the live performance without actually being on stage and in the way.
I’m not talking about a simulation of “the live performance experience”, but of a cinematic one.
In my experience until now, the usual film of opera (or live dance or theater/music performance) uses cameras as dramatizing telescopes, going up close or distant as they dolly along the front of the stage to keep up with the passage of time (or the libretto or stage directions or choreography) as, for instance, in among the many others, Il Complesso Barocco’s 2023 presentation of Ariodante.
Savoir’s cameras are "mirrors" – full-front, partial, around-corners and over-and under-walls. The mirror-cameras “point-of-view” the scene, responding “naturally” to their experience of movement and sound in the performance as whole. The achievement is the sense of a live performance filming a live performance. Part of my emotional response to the film may be because the camera work provokes mirroring, pretty rare for me for film.
Finally, although continuous filming of a single live performance, no edits, is not exclusive to Savoir’s film, I felt it as especially dynamic in his film.
Les Arts Florissants bills itself as a troupe dedicated to “revealing, discovering and reviving the Baroque spirit” and is not, strictly speaking, an opera troupe such as, say, Opéra de Paris or even a dedicated period orchestra such as Il Complesso Barocco, cited above (See the accompanying note - Baroque) Savoir’s achievement depends a lot on Les Arts Florissants’s broader or “holistic” approach to classic opera.
Because of how it sees its mission, Les Arts Florissants does not, even when it could, and as most others do, focus on singing and (when they can afford it) spectacle. Instead, its singers (and/or dancers), musicians and conductor are performers doing a performance together in single visual and sound space – almost, but not quite, theater.
I used sometimes to go to undress rehearsals at the opera that I found refreshing and powerful in a way a formal performance just can’t be. The Baroque troupe’s (live) performance has a similar effect on me. In undress, musicians, cast and staff focus on the getting the thing right – the thing being the sense and beauty of an artefact from another space-time and right being each individual performer’s singular and general contribution to that sense and beauty.
Dedicating to the Baroque spirit in the way of Les Arts Florissants turns out in practice to be pretty much the same as reaching for the thing. And the troupe ordinarily manages pretty much to get the thing right once they’ve grasped it. Since they do, Savoir’s mirror-cameras have a performance-oriented opera, something other than specialized singing and/or spectacle, to capture and transmit.
I said above that Savoir’s continuous filming strikes me as more dynamic than with other films. Part of the source for the feeling, I think, is that, in the same way as Les Arts Florissants’ performance orientation lends itself to Savoir’s camera, Savoir’s choice in sound reproduction lends itself to capturing the dynamism of live performance. I’m not talking about stereo or noise reduction or what not.
As I was experiencing the film, I was sent back to another moment of awakening sensibility in my past, which perhaps explains another part of the strong emotion the film raised in me. I first heard a band called The Moody Blues in a car equipped with an 8-track tape player. And O! The Moody Blues’ white satin nights! They blended. They swirled. As if the band was in the front seat.
When, next day, I bought the tape cassette and played it, however, I heard a melody, a rhythm trying to dance, not blending and swirling figures and phrases, band members jostling to harmonize in the front seat. I suddenly realized that recorded music is reproduced music, in the same way that photographs are mechanical pictures. Reproduction melodizes more often than it expands harmony.
Savoir’s sound reproduction goes with harmonizing, gets in the front seat with jostling musicians, so to say. By its underlying harmony the music lends itself to the dynamism built into the accrued movement involved in Les Arts Florissants' performance.
I hope Frédéric Savoir makes more live performance films like Ariodante. If he does, he’ll become a genre.
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I saw “Ariodante”, a film by Frédéric Savoir of Amazing Digital Studios, based on the continuous filming of a single representation of Georg Handel’s 1735 opera Ariodante in a private screening on 27 July 2025, featuring the orchestra of the Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie, and mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, Ariodante, a worthy heir; sopranos Ana Maria Labin and Ana Vieira Leite, respectively, Ginevra, Princess of Scotland, and Princess companion; countertenor Hugh Cutting, Polinesso, Duke of Albany; bass baritone Renato Dolcini, King of Scotland; and tenors Krešimir Špicer and Moritz Kallenberg, respectively, Lurcanio, Ariodante’s brother, and Odoardo, the King of Scotland’s companion. "Ariodante" the film debuted in at the Grand Rex Theater in Paris on 30 July 2025. For more information contact: [email protected]
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