This year’s London Handel Festival is centred around
the works composed during his stay in Italy, from 1706 to 1710, and
a wonderful array of programmes will unfold from now until May 11th,
all of them typical of the style which marks out this Festival, in that
they are carefully researched, artfully programmed, entertainingly presented
and, above all, they provide new insights into the works of this great
composer whose canon is full of sublime pieces which have yet to attain
the popularity they deserve. It was an inspired choice to begin the
festival with ‘Agrippina,’ since this must surely be the candidate for
the title of ‘most unjustly neglected of Handel’s operas’ - this performance
was its first revival in a London theatre since 1983, and between its
ecstatically received premiere in 1710 and the present day it has been
fully staged only a handful of times. Last night’s event was an absolute
triumph, for the Festival, for the students of the RCM, for the director
and conductor, but most of all, for Handel, whose genius shone out in
every scene of this witty, moving and endlessly engrossing work.
The idea of setting the corrupt intrigues of a venal
court in the parallel universe of a ‘Hello-style’ society, complete
with ‘Fairytale Wedding’ is hardly new, and I’m sure that Christopher
Cowell’s urbane production will have given offence to some, but they
will be those who are not at home with the level of sophistication which
he, thankfully, assumes: it’s all to easy to go for the tricksy, the
cheap laughs and the easy trans-society equivalents, but with just two
exceptions I found his ‘take’ on the Imperial shenanigans entirely fitting.
I’ll get those negatives out of the way first: Ottone’s ‘Don’t cry for
me, Agrippina’ made me wince, and the effect of Claudio’s lovely arioso
‘Hold me, my darling’ was ruined by being part of a comic moment – Poppea
frantically running to catch him lest he should fall down without his
sticks. Apart from those, I loved every minute: it is here, at this
intimate little theatre, with mainly young singers and directors, that
I have had the most deeply satisfying operatic experiences of the last
two seasons, and Londoners have much cause to be grateful for what the
RCM is doing here, since it is not just about nurturing youthful talent
but providing productions and singing of a quality to rival that offered
anywhere else in the capital.
Handel’s inspired choice of Grimani’s libretto allowed
him to present characters who, though of grand historical proportions,
were also intensely human and fallible: this is not the more heroic
treatment favoured by Metastasio – these people certainly do not sound
as though they ‘shit marble’ (att. Mozart) and the comic potential of
their foibles is given full rein. Corrupt and capricious they may be,
but Handel still encourages us to see their human side, however limited,
and Cowell’s fast-paced, lightly satirical, witty translation was the
perfect vehicle for the singers to convey the composer’s vision. Those
singers, a mixture of a few ‘old favourites’ for RCM regulars and some
newcomers to the student body, gave performances which were never less
than very good but in the case of three of the principals, superb by
any standards.
The role of Ottone is one of those areas of Handelian
dispute over which aficionados so love to bicker: on the two recordings
of the work which I have, the part is taken by Drew Minter and Michael
Chance, countertenors both, but Handel in fact wrote the part for a
woman and not a castrato, so the casting here of Jennifer Johnston was
as authentic as Handelians could desire. It came as no surprise to learn
that Jennifer, as well as being a Cambridge prize-winner for Music,
practised as a barrister until she decided to take up a place at the
RCM, for it is acute intelligence as well as a lovely voice which marks
her out as something truly special: here is a voice and a presence which,
however youthfully clumsy and unbecomingly costumed, goes straight to
the heart – not just because of the touching warmth of her tone quality
but her intense musicality, displayed most vividly in ‘Voi che udite
il mio lamento’ and ‘Vaghe fonti’ where the clarity of her diction,
the eloquence of her phrasing and the unaffected quality of her characterization
all gave the greatest pleasure. There were some curmudgeonly grimaces
at the bellows of approbation she was given at one point, but any Handelian
hearing her pleas of ‘Give me Justice!’ would surely be with those fond
bellowers in spirit.
Jennifer was a new discovery for me, but the singer
of the part of her rival in love here, the Emperor Claudio, was no stranger
to this stage or these pages; Sion Goronwy first impressed me with a
beautifully sung and hilariously acted Snug, following that up with
an impressive Simone in ‘Gianni Schicchi,’ and equally fine assumptions
of Tiresias in ‘Oedipus Rex’ and Sergeant Budd in ‘Albert Herring.’
This is a real Handelian Basso, just made for this kind of music
– you can’t help but hear in your imagination what a magnificent job
he’d make of ‘Arise, ye subterranean Winds’ or ‘Revenge, Timotheus Cries’
or, most of all, ‘How Willing My Paternal Love,’ since he has it all
– sufficient breath control to negotiate the fiendish coloratura, a
genuinely sonorous lower register complete with a satisfying low C which
he was able to display in a superb ‘Cade il mondo soggiogato’ and stage
presence to spare. This immensely (in every sense!) promising bass will
sing Christus in the Matthew Passion with Rogers Covey Crump’s Evangelist
at St. George’s Hanover Square on Good Friday, and he is certain to
be a Christus to remember.
The other suitor for Poppea’s hand was played with
equal skill by James Laing, a former Choral Scholar who is in his final
year of the BMus. course at the RCM, studying under Robin Blaze. James
began singing countertenor whilst still a sixth former at Uppingham,
and one can just see how he used that in this role – Cowell sees Nerone
as a sort of Prince Harry with perversions, and we got all the naughty
public schoolboy mannerisms and assumptions, but used artfully to show
the venal nature of this young man. His singing grew in stature as the
evening progressed, going from a fairly tentative ‘Col saggio tuo consiglio’
to a superbly confident ‘Come nube fugge dal vento’ – Nerone’s music
is often actually higher than Agrippina’s, and James negotiated the
vocal stratosphere with some aplomb. Hearing him sing lines like ‘As
the whirlwind devours the roses’ you could easily envisage his future
career in all the great countertenor roles.
Poppea is presented here as a frothy blonde intent
on self-gratification, and she was beautifully sung and vividly characterized
by Cora Burggraaf, another ‘RCM stalwart’ who made her first big impression
with a vibrant Helena. Cora looked fabulous in her flimsy outfits, and
she managed her stage business – including leg-waxing – with élan,
whilst giving an accurate, brightly enunciated account of the music,
especially in ‘Vaghe perle.’ I was slightly less impressed by the Agrippina
of Sarah-Jane Davies, but this is a fiendish role for an experienced
soprano, let alone one at the beginning of her career. Sarah-Jane has
the measure of the character as the director has conceived her, all
faux-maternal solicitude and naked ambition: you could well imagine
her saying, as the real Agrippina is reputed to have remarked, when
she was told that Nero would eventually kill her – ‘Occidat, dum imperet!-‘
Let him, so long as he is emperor!’ The voice is lovely, with real warmth
and musicality, and she gave a most involving account of ‘Pensieri,
voi mi tormentate,’ although at present her accuracy in the high-speed
coloratura is not ideally secure, and the line falters a little in some
of the slower numbers. This was, nevertheless, a very promising performance
in an immensely taxing role.
The parts of Pallante, Narciso and Lesbo were all impressively
taken by, respectively, James Harrison, David Sheringham and Thomas
Blunt, with the latter relishing his secondary role as paparazzo-in-residence:
the final tableau, with the ‘Family’ all aghast as they are shown the
results of his busy snapping, was hilarious, and formed the perfect
conclusion to this witty production. As always in this theatre, the
sets (Brigit Kimak) were minimal yet eloquent, with Perspex columns
used to great effect as Ottone speaks of the ‘soothing waters,’ a billowing
curtain and cushions to suggest the ‘boudoir’ and the whole dominated,
appropriately, by a vast, stylized laurel wreath and a golden globe.
The London Handel Orchestra was directed by the evergreen
Denys Darlow, whose love for this music shone through every bar. His
is a highly dramatic reading of the score, with the players going at
a cracking pace in the more spirited sections, and the continuo positively
sparkling: the sound of the theorbo and harpsichords in the introductory
bars of ‘As the Whirlwind’ was sheer joy. Handel’s biographer John Mainwaring
wrote of the first night of ‘Agrippina’ that the audience had never
known till then ‘all the powers of harmony and modulation so closely
arrayed, so forcibly combined,’ a sentiment which the present audience
could easily understand after this superb performance.
Melanie Eskenazi
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