Arts & Events

In an amazing show on Tuesday, April 9 at Zellerbach Hall, Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński sang, danced, pranced, flounced, shimmied, and sashayed all over the stage, doing cart-wheels, performing breakdances, and even taking a running leap onto a chair while singing all the while. When my 93 year-old seatmate observed that she had never seen anything like this in her entire life, I remarked that in terms of sheer energy, Jakub Józef Orliński’s performance over two hours without an intermission, could only be likened to Mick Jagger’s extremely physical antics on stage with The Rolling Stones on tour, a remark I now follow up by proclaiming Jakub Józef Orliński to be the Mick Jagger of opera. To take this comparison even further, with both Orliiński and Mick Jagger there is a certain gender ambiguity. At the Zellerbach show with the instrumental group Il Pomo d’Oro, Orliński took on both male and female roles from various Italian operas, and when he engaged in a pantomimed interaction with guitarist Miguel Rincon, Orliński flirted coyly and quite convincingly with the male guitarist.

Bay Area audiences may remember Jakub Józef Orliński’s local debut in the 2022 San Francisco Opera production of Gluck’s Orpheus ed Euridice, in which Orliński as Orpheus performed a re-markable breakdance during the opera’s overture. Among Orliński’s many talents, he is a champion breakdancer, evidence of which was amply demonstrated in his performance at Zellerbach with Il Pomo d’Oro. The show opened with an extended monologue from Orliński as Ottone from Claudio Monteverdi’s 1642 opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea. In the course of this monologue, Ottone ar-rives outside his house in Rome only to discover, much to his dismay, that during his absence his adored wife Poppea is cheating on him with the Emperor Nero. The scorned husband laments his fate and expresses his grief at this betrayal.

There followed arias from Italian opera composers Barbara Strozzi, Francesco Cavalli, Giovanni Cesare Netti, and Antonio Sartorio. Most of these arias, like Ottone’s aria from L’Incoronazione di Poppea, involved the grief and chagrin of a spurned lover betrayed by the woman he loved. Then, to mix things up, Jakub Józef Orliński took on the persona of an ageing woman, stooped over and shuffling along as she sang two arias by Giovanni Cesare Netti from his 1681 opera L’Adamiro. Orliński was totally convincing in the role of this ageing woman who laments the fading of beauty but fondly recalls her younger days. The concluding aria was from Sebastiano Moratelli’s 1699 opera La Faretra smarrita. For encores, the indefatigablle Jakub Jósef Orliński and Il Pomo d’Oro performed arias by Boretti, Cavalli, Orlandoni, and a repeat of Sartorio’s aria from the main pro-gram.