Double the pleasure

Handel
Wigmore Hall

Die tote Stadt
Royal Opera House

It was, though by less than it could have been. I think this was the best Acis I have heard, certainly better than the busy but characteristically dry performance on CD under William Christie, but it was marred by annoying horseplay. Polyphemus was urged by the superfluous young shepherd Coridon to present Galatea with a St Valentine’s Day card, red roses and a bottle of wine. Key for split sides on the part of the Wigmore regulars. But did we need this? This idiotic invention of consumerism is just the kind of thing one hopes to escape at such venues, and you could find it in the overcrowded restaurants, streets and bars nearby and everywhere else. That apart, Mhairi Lawson and James Gilchrist made an admirably non-ageist pair of lovers, and in ‘Happy, happy we’ managed, quite brilliantly, to convey both genuine joy and the idiocy of such a state in a world as alarming as theirs and ours. Christopher Purves, with a less taxing role than in Aci, was still immense, with fathomless low notes, and a hateful expression passim. He also has music of strange pathos, in this deeply Purcellian piece — but isn’t it better than anything by Purcell? Handel, alternating blitheness with desolation, here approaches the seemingly very different greatness of Schubert, and what praise could possibly be higher than that?

I revisited, earlier in the week, the Royal Opera’s Die tote Stadt, since another production in the near future seems unlikely. I was still more impressed than before. This tale of the pointlessness of hanging on to what has irrevocably gone may sport an obvious moral, and have music which is rather markedly at odds with it — since somehow Korngold’s idiom suggests one could happily be becalmed in that cloying late-Romantic world forever — but it makes for potent theatre in a production as ingenious as this, and as superlatively conducted as by Ingo Metzmacher. Nadja Michael was more often in tune than on opening night, but she doesn’t have a rich voice; her acting is superb. Stephen Gould has a tenor voice which is wearing thin worryingly soon; but Gerald Finley seems timelessly youthful and sings everyone else off the stage. I’m delighted Covent Garden had the courage to mount this opera, and hope, but feebly, that they might make further incursions into this repertoire.

BBC Radio 3 will broadcast Die tote Stadt on Saturday 23 May.