Handel
Wigmore Hall
Die tote Stadt
Royal Opera House
The Wigmore Hall last Saturday afternoon and evening was a scene of sheer delight, with Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo being performed before tea, and Acis and Galatea in the evening. It was all masterminded by Paul McCreesh, with his Gabrieli Consort and Players, and a uniformly fine set of soloists, who also constituted the chorus. The Gabrieli Consort, which I unfortunately very rarely have cause to encounter in the pursuit of duty, is a wonderful early-instrument group, characterised by extraordinary sweetness of tone, and by an expressiveness which would be regarded as quaint if it didn’t emerge from the right kind of instruments. Even hearing them tune up is a pleasure — in fact I half-thought they had launched into the Overture to Agrippina, which was used as the opening to the first piece, when they were still awaiting the arrival of the towering McCreesh and the soloists.
Aci, Galatea e Polifemo dates from 1708, when Handel was 23 and living in Naples, and fully absorbing the musical atmosphere there. Anyone in the audience at the Wigmore who was afraid that we were going to hear two not dissimilar variants on a story must have been pleasantly surprised, for this Italian Handel is full of vocal flourishes and hair-raising coloratura, all of it dispatched with the greatest urbanity by the cast, which only numbers three in this version. There are large chunks of recitative, in fact it is a verbose text, where for the only time ever I have felt that Handel had too little plot to cope with, almost none: the shepherd Aci is in love with the nymph Galatea, and their happiness is first threatened and then destroyed by the intrusion of the lustful Polifemo. All is not lost, however; or that’s what the characters think, since Aci is turned into a stream in which Galatea can spend eternity bathing. That doesn’t seem to me a big advance on Orfeo’s becoming a constellation in Monteverdi’s first opera, but perhaps I have an inadequate feeling for Nature.
The most imposing feature of Aci is the amount of music given to Polifemo: he does all the things he says he will, both in speech — bellowing, snarling, roaring — and in action, and requires the most prodigious vocal range in which to do them. Fortunately Christopher Purves, never more in his element than when playing sadistic villains, has the technique and the notes, and he was hilarious, frightening and awe-inspiring. The lovers, whose most distinctive vocal feature is that Galatea’s tessitura is lower than Aci’s, caroled, languished, lamented, affirmed adorably. It was hard to imagine that the evening would be as delightful as the afternoon had been.
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.
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