Britten Sinfonia/Watkin - Handel, Messiah, 16 December 2021

Barbican Hall

Harriet Eyley (soprano)
Jess Dandy (contralto)
Stuart Jackson (tenor)
James Newby (baritone)

Choir of Jesus College, Cambridge (director, organ: Richard Pinel)

Britten Sinfonia

David Watkin (conductor)

Messiahs take many forms. They did during the eighteenth century; they did in the nineteenth; they did in the twentieth; despite the more or less complete victory of ‘authentic’—was ever the term less apt than for this work?—performance practices in the rest of Handel’s œuvre, they have continued to do so in the twenty-first. Sadly, even tragically, the video of that inimitable ‘Handel meets Pop with Messias’, starring the still-more-inimitable Robbin Casey, seems to have vanished not only from YouTube but the planet. (Please do let me know if you have a copy of the original broadcast!) But we still have options ranging from Mozart to McCreesh, from Beecham to Britten Sinfonia. The small forces employed here, including a tiny orchestra (strings 3.3.2.2.1) and a choir of only twenty-six (men and women but not boys of Jesus College), were at least in part a response to the dread virus. They were perhaps not what one might have imagined ideal for the Barbican and would probably have worked better at home in the warmer acoustic of that most magical of Cambridge chapels. One’s ears nonetheless adjusted to aesthetics as well as to pragmatics. Not only would it be churlish and pointless to object too strongly; it would also arguably ignore the fact that pragmatics have almost always been an important part of aesthetics. Handel, after all, never composed a Helicopter-Quartet. 

That a musician such as David Watkin, so well versed in what, for better or worse, we have come to know as ‘historical performance’, would take an anti-Romantic, or perhaps better a non-Romantic, line should have come as little surprise. The Britten Sinfonia’s versatility is such that these players could doubtless follow any lead with equal relish. Nicely detailed playing in, for instance, ‘But who may abide the day of his coming?’ permitted of considerable instrumental drama, whatever the numbers involved. So too, naturally, did that greatest of musical rarities: a true and fine contralto voice, in this case Jess Dandy’s. When it came to ‘He was despised…,’ the plainness of some of the orchestral playing was a little underwhelming, yet Dandy’s voice and interpretation continued to carry the performance.

In any case, Watkin’s direction was in general pragmatic, clearly aiming to build a performance founded not upon an ideal, but on the forces in front of him. If I suspect I shall never share ‘period’ predilection for ending numbers in what I hear as merely perfunctory fashion, I watched and listened eagerly to hear the way Watkin worked with his soloists, no diktat handed down from above, but rather making the most of Stuart Jackson’s dramatic, even operatic flair, Harriet Eyley’s appealingly bell-like soprano, or James Newby’s rich yet agile baritone. So too was this the case for the young choral musicians, for many of whom the past twenty-one months will have been particularly trying. If ‘All we like sheep’ bobbed along amiably, if little more, the winning, Saul-like responsorial singing of ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates’, and agile passage work of ‘Let us break their bonds asunder’ duly impressed, as did the grandeur, finally achieved, of the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus. Most stood, although one peculiar soul, who had disturbed ‘How beautiful are the feet’ and a couple of other numbers with incredibly noisy crisp-eating elected instead to film the performance on his telephone.  Music-making is itself a human good, a human necessity: something none of us should ever forget again, even in the unlikely event further ‘restrictions’ do not return. 

Coloratura was a distinct strength to all concerned: not only ‘in itself’, but as put to dramatic use; so too was stylish and varied ornamentation. This is an oratorio, one can readily forget, that is simply scored. In an unassuming performance such as this, one welcomes perhaps all the more the coming of bright trumpets in ‘Glory to God in the highest’, certainly as much as telling, if often subtle, shifts between numbers in tempo. One size has never fit all, and never will. And if this will never, should never, come across as a dramatic, narrative oratorio in the mode of many of Handel’s, there was much to enjoy in that mode too: Jackson fairly scourging with his voice (‘All they that see Him…’), at times coming across as Handel’s unconscious response to Bach’s Evengelists; Ryder’s tasteful intensification of vibrato for Christ’s resurrection in ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’; and Newby’s moving representation of words and theology, allied to equally fine trumpet-playing (Imogen Whitehead) in ‘The trumpet shall sound’. A euphonious final chorus served not only as fitting aesthetic culmination, but worked as a keenly felt moral metaphor for what we had seen, head, and God willing, participated in too. Amen.

La corona, Bampton Classical Opera, 18 May 2021

St John’s, Smith Square

Atalanta – Samantha Louis-Jean
Meleagro – Harriet Eyley
Climene – Lisa Howarth
Asteria – Lucy Anderson
Narrator – Rosa French

CHROMA

Robert Howarth (conductor)


La corona: Bampton Classical Opera certainly selected a title for our times. However, the English translation under which it was promoted, The Crown, not only has televisual contemporary resonance, but reminds us that every crown, though arguably a misfortune, is not quite a sign of a deadly virus. Not that the eighteenth century, at least until its close, saw things that way. In Europe, at least, monarchies seemed the height of modernity, the path to the future. The old prize of universal monarchy retained currency, albeit in conflict with more novel notions of the balance of power. Those few republics remaining were ailing, unlikely models for human flourishing. And at the centre of Europe remained the Holy Roman Empire and Habsburg monarchy, recently separated yet now once again reunited under Francis (Stephen) I and Maria Theresa.


This was the last of the dozen Metastasio libretti the Vienna court poet named ‘azione teatrale’: that is, a serenata, with definite action and to be staged. We should not get too hung up on the term, more a vague description than a genre; it is difficult to say why, say, L’isola disabitata (as set by Haydn, among many others) and Il sogno di Scipione (as set by many before Mozart, and at least one after him) should be considered such and other, similar works should not, let alone why the Orfeo of Calzabigi and Gluck, quite un-Metastasian, should originally have received that designation.


Gluck’s music, now lost, for an Iphigenia in Aulis ballet, first written for the Imperial Castle at Laxenburg, had been given once more a few months later at Innsbruck for the 1765 wedding of the Archduke Leopold (later Leopold II) to Infanta Maria Luisa (who later notoriously dismissed Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito as ‘una porcheria tedesca’). Having left the theatre at its conclusion, Francis suffered a fatal stroke in his carriage. The theatres closed and the azione teatrale in preparation for Francis’s name-day, in performance by a quartet of his daughters (the Archduchesses Maria Elisabeth, Maria Amalia, Maria Josepha, and Maria Carolina), went unperformed until a 1966 Austrian radio broadcast. Staging had to wait until 1987, in Schönbrunn’s Salon de Bataille, where Gluck’s premiere would have taken place.


The present performance, however, was given in concert, like the British premiere, also from 1987, slightly earlier, at the City of London Festival. In place of secco recitatives, we had a linking English narration. Having drawn inevitable reference to the other ‘corona’, it clearly told us where we were, what was going on, and sketched a broader mythological and literary context, lightly yet learnedly allusive. Context, that is, to the slight tale of who should take credit for the Calydonian boar hunt: ultimately neither Atalanta nor her sister, Climene, neither Princess Asteria nor or Prince Meleagro, but the goddess Diana. It culminates in bestowal of the crown of laurels on the keen royal huntsman Francis. Rosa French delivered her narration with elegance and wit.


The music is fresh, in many respects glorious, certainly well deserving of greater acquaintance, though this is no drama in the sense of the ‘reformist’ Gluck. (Nor was it intended to be.) Robert Howarth’s direction from the harpsichord of CHROMA was forthright and unfussy, well judged in balance and tempo, if occasionally a little four-square for my ears in negotiating Gluck’s structures. (We clearly hear Gluck differently, which is no crime. Far better this, in any case, than egoistic conducting that aims above all to draw attention to itself.)


All four singers acquitted themselves with honour, complementing and lightly contrasting as befitting. The extremity of Atalanta’s coloratura—could the Habsburg-Lorraine princesses really have come anywhere near singing this music?—was effortlessly tamed by Samantha Louis-Jean. Lucy Anderson’s spirited Asteria and Lisa Howarth’s sincere Climene were equally stylish. So too did Harriet Eyley’s Meleagro, whose heroism en travesti, both bright-toned and variegated, proved just the ‘early Classical’ ticket. If the splendid penultimate number, a duet between Atalanta and Meleagro, left both in peril of being outshone by Emma Feilding’s oboe, then that is Gluck’s doing. A joy from beginning to end, whatever our views on crowns, viruses, and their intersection.

La finta giardiniera, Royal College of Music, 28 November 2016

Britten Theatre

 

Violante/Sandrina – Josephine Goddard

Belfiore – Joel Williams

Anchise – Richard Pinkstone

Arminda – Ida Ränzlöv

Ramiro – Katie Coventry

Serpetta – Harriet Eyley

Roberto – Julien van Mellaerts

 

Harry Fehr (director)

Roxana Haines (assistant director)

Yannis Thavoris (designs)

John Bishop (lighting)

Victoria Newlyn (choreography)

Royal College of Music of Opera Orchestra

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

I saw my first Finta giardiniera close to eight years ago, at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre. In between, I have also been fortunate enough to see a very different staging, indeed a more or less total reimagining of the work, from Hans Neuenfels, in Berlin. Now, it was back to the Britten Theatre for a new staging. Not too bad, then, for a work that hovers on the fringes of the repertory – although how absurd that a work fully the equal of any of Haydn’s operas is still so relatively neglected, if not quite so scandalously neglected as Haydn’s works themselves. Three cheers, though, to the RCM, for another splendid evening, and for placing such faith in this lovely work!

 

Harry Fehr’s production is ‘based on one which was first presented at the 2013 Buxton Festival’: slightly odd wording, but anyway. The important thing is that it is fresh, lively, abidingly theatrical. It does not explore the depths that Neuenfels did in his Pforten der Liebe; there is little, perhaps no, sense of the darkness of love, nor indeed of the German director’s fantasy. By the same token, though, it avoids the tendency towards preciosity of the previous RCM production (Jean-Claude Auvray). A moneyed, contemporary Long Island setting works well and, quite simply, looks good. Yannis Thavoris’s excellent designs are resourceful in their suggestion of broader social milieu, but also provide elegant framing for the action. For my taste, Fehr perhaps overplays the farcical element; there were certainly times when I wished the production would calm down, just a little. On the other hand, a work very much, I think, in the tradition of Carlo Goldoni arguably brings Mozart closer than he had previously come, or would come again, to the world of Rossini. I just do not think it is that close, and should have preferred something that engaged with the surely undeniable presentiments of Così fan tutte. (On the other hand, when one thinks what Così often must endure…) In any case, all is smartly, slickly accomplished – and it offers a fine showcase for the young singers.

 

Fortunately, there was not much in the musical performances that approached Rossini. (However much I may differ from the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt with respect to what I want to hear in Mozart, I certainly share with him that vehement opposition he voiced to any tendency towards unvariegated breathlessness.) Michael Rosewell’s reading did not draw especial attention to itself. Tempi were judiciously varied; perhaps a little more variety would not have gone amiss, but I am being ungrateful. The spirited playing of the orchestra only occasionally had me miss the sound of a slightly larger band (strings a parsimonious 6.5.4.3.2), but that may well have been as much a matter of acoustics. Jo Ramadan’s harpsichord continuo proved supportive, exhibiting none of the irritating exhibitionism one often hears today (especially on the fortepiano). Orchestral solos were well taken throughout; if one does not miss the clarinet in Mozart, one must be on the right track.

 

The disguised marchioness herself, Violante/Sandrina, received a likeable performance from Josephine Goddard, integrity of character at the heart of her reading. Joel Williams’s cavalier, not a little devilish Belfiore would clearly return to her, and he did. The sparkle of his eminently musical performance was matched, at the very least, by Ida Ränzlöv’s Arminda, dressed to kill (not quite literally, although one would not necessarily have been surprised) by Thavoris. Richard Pinkstone’s tenor contrasted enough from Williams’s to suggest difference of character; his subtly more buffo (never too much) demeanour confirmed it. (There are considerable distinctions of social order in Mozart’s writing, even this early; almost the only thing this opera lacks is the later delineation and depth of individual character.) If Pinkstone’s Anchise, splendidly contrasted to this summer’s outstanding Hänsel und Gretel Witch, thereby attested to considerable versatility, Katie Coventry’s Ramiro confirmed her gift, already shown by her Hänsel, for the mezzo trouser role, both in timbre and demeanour. Such alertness and social awareness extended to the pair of servants rounding off the cast: Julien van Mellaerts’s affable Roberto and Harriet Eyley’s knowing Serpetta, very much in the line of Pergolesi. Ensemble was tight throughout, permitting different lines to tell and yet also to combine. Such is the essence of this opera; it was equally the essence of this performance.