First performed in 1649 at the Venetian Teatro San Cassiano, the world's first public musical theater, Francesco Cavalli's opera Giasone was one of the first works of the genre, then still quite young, to be performed throughout Europe. A typical Venetian stage work of the time, it plays with the tragic and the comic, with no regard for fidelity to the ancient myth of Jason and Medea. Rather, the opera offers an entertaining mosaic of contrasting episodes that cleverly blend comedy, tragedy and the supernatural. The whole is held together by the ingenious music of Cavalli, who once again proves himself a worthy successor to Monteverdi. The production from the Grand Theâtre in Geneva with Leonardo Garcia Alarcón and the Cappella Mediterranea, unanimously praised by the critics, lives not only from an outstanding cast (including Valer Sabadus as Giasone and Kristina Hammarström as Medea), but also from the fast, witty, virtuosic as well as detailed and at the same time highly poetic direction by Serena Sinigaglia.