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Handel, Belshazzar:  Production from the Staatsopera Berlin, soloists of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, chorus RIAS-Kammerchor, orchestra Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, René Jacobs conductor. Grand Theatre de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France. 23. 7.2008 (MM)

Opera, the extravagant art, has suffered at times during its long history, the victim of religious and political repression but more often strangled by lack of money.  Strangely, when opera suffers financial hardship it usually thrives and Handel's Belshazzar at the Aix Festival is a case in point.  Not that the Festival d'Aix did not pay about as much as could possibly be paid for an opera production, importing this one lock, stock and barrel (sets and costumes, orchestra, chorus, some principals) from the Staatsoper Berlin.

Handel's financial problems are legend.  He lost his shirt producing opera, so he began writing oratorios instead.  Oratorios were essentially operas without the expense of the Baroque's scenic marvels, without the sumptuous costumes of its royalty, and without expensive Italian singers.  Even so the economics of 18th century oratorios are puzzling - the magnificent choruses Handel that added to his arsenal of vocal effects and the larger oratorio orchestras could hardly have been cheap, given the sheer numbers of singers and players needed not to mention the rehearsal time needed to master less familiar and more complex music.

Handel's oratorios did not need opera stars;  they needed local singers able to deliver the English words of newly created librettos (real opera librettos were endlessly recycled).  The stories were told with current sensibilities, therefore speaking directly to contemporary mores and even patriotism.  In fact the program booklet essay for this production, imported from Berlin as well, explains that Belshazzar is a defense of English Protestantism attacked by progressive, enlightened continental thinking.  This was powerful, successful art for the mid-eighteenth century, and Handel died a rich man.

Berlin, the miracle of post cold war Europe, is rich and creative, always on the lookout for new operatic extravagances.  The current Handel mania could only be enlivened by staging one of these powerful works of art, thus Berlin built a huge, magnificent production and imported expensive English and American opera singers, including star-turn counter-tenor Bejun Mehta.  Add to this a superb local Baroque instrumental ensemble (with its roots in the old East Germany by the way) and an accomplished vocal ensemble (with its roots in the American sector), not to mention an easily accessible world-renowned early music conductor, René Jacobs:  and voilà, an operatic hit.

Christophe Nel, a well-respected metteur en scène in progressive German opera houses (Stuttgart and Frankfurt) teamed up with famed Swiss minimalist set designer Roland Aeschlimann and costume designer Bettina Walter to create a production which respected the supposed austerity of oratorio and certainly adhered to the contemporary German sensibility that less is more. This experienced team brought Handel's not-so-high drama and philosophic tragedy to almost operatic dramatic standards as the Persian prince Cyrus overran the dissolute Babylonians and freed the captive Jews.

The four, moving horizontal sections of a huge back wall were most often tiered, creating levels that could be scaled, sometimes easily and sometimes with difficulty,  by principals and chorus alike. The essentially static nature of Handel's dramaturgy was thereby overcome, and was certainly emotionally intensified by these constant climbing and descending movements, spectacularly accented with spider-like activity by four male acrobats, henchmen of Nabucco's son Belshazzar. The scenographically marvelous was exploited, a corpse falling from the heavens as blood began oozing through a central seam of the wall sections, now a flat back, to presage  the imminent destruction of Nabucco's empire.

The abstractly costumed chorus was at one moment the Babylonians and then he Jews, the change of nationality accomplished by a simple change of placement on the stage or deployment on the walls.  These changing crowds were further sculpted by the striking use of lighting, a technique that accented a vivid presence for each population.  Costume designs were used as decoration in the program booklet, though disappointingly the high emotionality of the designs had been modified for the Aix stage- Belshazzar was not bare chested here, nor was the prophet Daniel nude.

The Persian prince Cyrus, deliverer of the Jews, was sumptuously sung in heroic stances by Bejun Mehta, a male soprano with tenorial balls.  Rosemary Joshua, Belshazzar's mother Nitocris, sang in convincingly Handelian terms, and convincingly portrayed  a religious zealot troubled by her wayward son.  Most beautiful too was the singing of Neal Davies as the Syrian Gobrias, whose son had been killed by the dissolute emperor Belshazzar, a role also well sung and broadly characterised by American tenor, Kenneth Taylor.  Only the Daniel of Kristina Hammarström disappointed; not fitting vocally or histrionically the program booklet's costume picture that indicated a far more vivid personage.

The star of the show was the RIAS-Kammerchor, able to personify Babylonians or Jews at the drop of a hat, singing magnificently as an opera chorus - never as a concert choir - able to maneuver itself back and forth, up and down around the set and never missing an entrance in Handel's complex choral fugues. (This is the same chorus that appeared naked in Sasha Walz' staging of Dido and Aeneas). The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin again proved itself a world-class chamber ensemble. Rich in experience of the venerable René Jacobs' direction,  both chorus and orchestra were  at their most formidable.

Michael Milenski

Picture © Elisabeth Carecchio

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