Agrippina, HGO, 13 May 2023

Jacksons Lane Arts Centre

Agrippina – Astrid Joos
Poppea – Biqing Zhang
Nerone – Katie Macdonald
Claudio – George Robarts
Ottone – Francesco Giusti
Narciso – Hamish McLaren
Pallante – Gheorghe Palcu
Lesbo – Sonny Fielding
Giunone – Lydia Shariff

Ashley Pearson (director)
Sorcha Corcoran (set design)
Alice Carroll (costumes)
Catja Hamilton (lighting)

Douglas Baker (projections)

HGOAntiqua Orchestra
Thomas Payne (conductor)

Claudio (George Robarts), Poppea (Biqing Zhang)
Images: Laurent Compagnon

Cannily marketed as ‘the coronation that goes wrong’, HGO’s Agrippina proved quite the tonic for a May that has still seemed hesitant to acknowledge the coming of spring. Handel’s early opera, written in 1709 for the Venice Carnival, emerged as a considerably stronger work than it did in a starry, somewhat irritating production I saw four years ago in Munich. (Later that year, it came to Covent Garden.) In the small theatre of Jacksons Lane Arts Centre in Highgate, HGO presented a work which, whatever its flaws, cohered and remained open for the audience to bring to it what it would.  

I say ‘whatever its flaws’, because they seemed far more apparent in Munich than in Highgate, so perhaps the flaws lay more with this listener than with the work. Not all the arias are top-drawer Handel; some, in light of the composer’s notorious ‘borrowings’, are barely Handel at all. Few, however, outstay their welcome—or did here, whereas the leaden conducting I heard in Munich led to more than a little consulting of my watch. There, redistribution into two acts had seemed a mistake; here, if perhaps not ideal on paper, it really did not matter in practice and proved an eminently practical solution to a real problem for a modern company, especially one with limited reserves. One must take the genre for what it is, of course, and I doubt I shall ever be convinced that Handel as dramatist is not better deployed in his oratorios, but here the story was told clearly and with intelligence and wit. If I find it impossible to banish Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea from my mind when considering these characters, that is my problem rather than Handel’s. Ashley Pearson and her team’s resourceful production made a little go a long way, projections of social media both conceptually framing the action and marking its progression through time and changing circumstances. Poppea’s following through the power of the image and Ottone’s public esteem on account of acknowledged valour were conveyed with uncanny fidelity through (post-)modern means. Above all, though, the accent in a small theatre lies on Personenregie, and this was keenly, powerfully accomplished throughout.

Agrippina (Astrid Joos), Nerone (Katie Macdonald)

Every member of the young cast contributed to that sharpness of individual characterisation and its place within a greater whole. In the title role, Astrid Joos’s vocal portrayal reminded us that, beyond the scheming, this is a woman fighting with what she has—and who would doubtless be fighting in quite a different way under a different gender dispensation. Biqing Zhang's Poppea presented a similarly rounded portrayal, making her way as she could and, arguably, must. Katie Macdonald captured well the sulky immaturity of Nerone through tone and gesture, deploying coloratura equally well to highly dramatic effect. George Robarts offered a nicely ambiguous Claudio: one never knew quite what to make of him, which was surely the point. Gheorghe Paicu and Sonny Fielding’s sharply etched Pallante and Lesbo, as well as Hamish McLaren’s countertenor Narciso, rounded out the intrigue and its sharply (not in pitch!) shifting terms. For me, though, the more ‘continental’ countertenor of Francesco Giusti as Ottone made perhaps the greatest impression. Fine stage presence was married to a more earthy, even masculine tone and projection than often you will hear, conveying valour and vulnerability in equal measure. Juno’s was very much a guest appearance, perhaps an ‘also starring’ moment. Lydia Shariff a goddess and she knows it—as do the mortals, however elevated, before her. It was a splendid thing to have and enjoy this moment, rather than regret its excision, but then one could have said the same of so much else.

Ottone (Francesco Giusti)

Thomas Payne’s direction of an excellent small band of period instrumentalists both drove and reflected the action. My preference may lie with a modern orchestra, but such were the excellence and commitment of playing here, I could for once quite appreciate the arguments for this alternative. With every player essentially a soloist as well as an ensemble member, there was, moreover, an almost modern sense of music theatre to the enterprise, heightened by proximity of orchestra and stage. For, whatever my particular favourites, this was above all a company effort, company extending beyond those performing to all involved in HGO’s collegial enterprise. As David Conway, HGO’s chairman, said at the beginning, it is here, not in the Arts Council’s absurd vision of opera in car parks, that the future of the art lies.

 

Ensemble, headed by Juno (Lydia Shariff)

Venus and Adonis/Dido and Aeneas, HGO, 20 May 2022

Cockpit Theatre


Venus – Elizabeth Green
Adonis – Conall O’Neill
Cupid – Ralph Thomas Williams
Shepherdess – Hannah Savignon-Smythe
Huntsman – Matthew Secombe
Shepherds – Garreth Romain, Angelo Fallaria, Fabian Tindale Geere

Dido – Katey Rylands
Aeneas – Sonny Fielding
Belinda – Julia Surette
Sorceress – Helena Cooke
Second Woman – Isabelle Haile
Witches – Olivia Carrell, Abbie Ward
Spirit – Hannah Savignon-Smythe
Sailor – Matthew Secombe

Jessica Dalton (director)
Kate Goldie Cheetham (choreography)

Tom Turner (lighting) 

HGOAntiqua Orchestra
Seb Gillot (conductor)

Images: Laurent Compagnon, @LaurentCphotos 
Dido and Aeneas

Two operas from the English dawn of the genre: a winning combination, if not so frequently encountered as one might expect. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is, of course, universally considered a landmark in the histories both of English music and of opera: ‘Tristan and Isolde in a pint pot’, as Raymond Leppard once called it (and I have probably quoted at least once too often). Blow’s Venus and Adonis, still earlier and more closely tied to the Stuart court masque tradition, will doubtless always be less popular; it has many of its own virtues, though, which arguably emerge all the more clearly when one has such opportunity not only to compare but also to contrast. 

HGO’s Venus, directed by Jessica Dalton, begins aptly enough in the office of a modern dating bureau, an obvious yet telling location for Cupid to initiate his Prologue proceedings, essentially a programme of instruction (as becomes more apparent still in the second of the three short acts). Shepherds and shepherdesses try out, consider, and swap partners—probably inconclusively. Then the action returns to more or less where it ‘should’ be: a mythological setting that is probably ancient, but really could be anywhere, suggesting a ‘universality; that will be part, though only part, of our consideration when answering the puzzling—and puzzlingly little asked—question as to why we are so interested in the art of the past at all, and how it comes to speak to us. Various second-act dances—perhaps more masque than opera, even by this work’s standards—are well choreographed and danced, such as might well have pleased the man who above all had to be pleased: Charles II. Often, less is more; here, something straightforward and stylish eminently fits the bill. 

Venus (Elizabeth Green), Adonis (Conall O'Neill), Cupid (Ralph Thomas Williams)

Questions of performance and meaning are complicated further, of course, by a performing art such as music, indeed perhaps especially so by music, more so than spoken drama, in which we can cling to the fiction—we hardly have an alternative—that our ‘instruments’ remain the same. We do so, to greater or lesser extents, when it comes to voices, but greater controversies issue with respect to other musical instruments. Today, again somewhat puzzlingly, opera appears to have decided upon a mixture of ‘period’ musical practices and more  ‘contemporary’, or at least ‘modern’, theatre. This is not really the place to question that; it is a complex question, and much is a matter of business too, as well as allied pragmatics. What we see and hear is generally said to work, and we (nearly) all want something that works rather than something that does not. Such questions and others, related, are nevertheless worth reminding ourselves of, though, at least from time to time; for surely history interests when it renders strange, as well as when it renders familiar, and these things are likely to change according to what is (and is not) more common practice.   

For Dido, we return to an office. I admit I had not at all gathered Dalton’s concept, prior to reading the programme. Apparently, the action takes place ‘in the halls of a modern political institution, something a little like the UN perhaps, or the EU’, and Dido is a political leader. I am afraid it all looked rather like a provincial sales office to me, perhaps having an ‘away day’. It is probably not worth retelling my misunderstanding beyond that, other than to say that the witches appear to be cleaners, understandably offended by the mess people had made, and that Dido eventually swallows some pills, no pyre in sight. I was clearly not on the right wavelength, yet in retrospect can see a degree of overall framing between the two works, the loneliness of online dating replicated in that of Dido’s suicide and the inability of others to see in time what had happened.   

Dido (Katey Rylands) and Aeneas (Sonny Fielding)

Musically, however, one could enjoy a parade of excellent, increasingly confident young singers, all of them worth our attention, providing a sense of company both in dramatic interaction and in their coming together (some of them) as small chorus in both operas. Elizabeth Green’s Venus and Conall O’Neill’s Adonis were both beautifully sung, with excellent attention to verbal as well as musical matters. Ralph Thomas Williams’s Cupid made for a lively and mischievous cat to set among the pigeons. Katey Rylands and Sonny Fielding offered a Dido and Aeneas who grew considerably within the small confines of Purcell’s operas, the former’s Lament deeply moving in the best of traditions, the latter’s dark tone nicely suggestive of wounded masculinity. Again, verbal and musical acuity were finely matched. A fine ‘supporting’ cast had no weak links; I shall mention Isabelle Haile and Matthew Secombe as singers who especially caught my ear. 

Using his own, specially prepared editions, Seb Gillot led a small ‘period’ band in performances that loved to dance, but also to engage in dramatically generative gradations of recitative, aria, and much that lies between (whether in more Italianate, French, or English styles), as well as in affective tonality (perhaps especially strong in Dido). In Dido, Gillot provides music for much of what has been lost, though not the mythological prologue. The additional music works well, and permits a fuller, speculative experience—as in that of, say, Benjamin Britten’s edition—of what might have been. There is imagination If I was initially surprised to hear an oboe in the Overture, my ears adjusted: so much so that there was at least one moment later on when I could have sworn I heard a wind instrument, only to look and see that a viola had tricked me. There is probably an unflattering name for such an aural condition, but here we should take it to indicated a committed performance whose small scale did not preclude greater and amply realised ambition. The darker harmonies of Dido were certainly present, portraying Venus intriguingly and productively as the more distant from us. Form, vividly apparent, helped accomplish this too. This may not always be the way I hear Purcell or Blow in my head, but it would be surprising if it were. I learned much from listening, which is all I can ask.

I shall be hearing—and seeing—Dido again next month in very different circumstances, as part of a double-bill with Bluebeard’s Castle, directed by Barrie Kosky. There is room for all, and I do not doubt that memories of this performance, as well as others, will frame and inform how I respond to that too. However unfashionable it may be to speak in such terms, Dido and Aeneas is an imperishable masterpiece; every encounter should be a joy. This, in its well-chosen context, was certainly that. As for my misunderstanding of the staging, I shall ascribe it to tiredness at the end of a long week.