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Handel, Semele at Pacific Opera Victoria : Soloists, cond. Timothy Vernon, dir. Wim Trompert, set and costumes by Brian Perchaluk, lighting designer Ereca Hassell, chorus dir. Michael Drislane, Royal Theatre, Victoria, British Columbia, 14.2.2009 (BJ)

Nathalie Paulin (Semele) and Anita Krause (Ino)
 

By the end of the evening, Handel had worked his magic. At intermission, a successful conclusion hadn’t looked likely, but the second half of this production was immeasurably better than the first. Some elements, it’s true, were fine all the way through, most notably the orchestral playing under Timothy Vernon’s skillful direction (though I wish he hadn’t cut the charming gavotte that ends the overture), and in Act III both baritone Nathaniel Watson, evoking the god of sleep in sumptuous tones against Handel’s miraculous orchestral writing, and soprano Nathalie Paulin, in the title role, delivering some spectacular music with all the virtuosity that had eluded her in the first two acts, raised the vocal standards of the evening to a thoroughly commendable level.

Up to this point, aside from some less than stellar singing, the main problem lay with the production. Director Wim Trompert had elected to shift the classical mythological story to the Victorian period, arguing in his program note that this provided “the right setting” for societal pressures on Semele, pregnant with Jupiter’s child – a pregnancy that “has become the focus of this production.” 

Benjamin Butterfield as Jupiter

The trouble was, first of all, that the shift of environment was quite inconsistently applied. How, indeed, could it not have been, considering the implosion of a group of variously bedecked Olympian gods into the morning-coated setting of a Victorian wedding party? Then there was the treatment of the chorus, whose members were forced mostly onto their knees, or lower still into absurdly writhing postures, and who, like most of the cast, had to sing from these vocally unhelpful positions.

All this was happening on a simple unit set, with a revolve that seemed to be twirled almost at random, whenever the director felt that the characters had been in one place long enough. Moreover, apart from the disconnect between the world of ancient Greek lechery and the vaguely suggested one of supposedly Victorian propriety, there were also some total disconnects between the characters’ reactions and what was going on in the story and the music. The most glaring example came when Semele, by taking Ino’s hand and placing it on her swelling belly, revealed her hitherto unsuspected pregnancy to her sister. Anita Krause, the vocally somewhat insecure mezzo who doubled the role of Ino with that of Juno, responded with a convincing facial expression of radiant joy – and was promptly called on to sing a song about music, which hardly seemed a very sisterly reaction.

Benjamin Butterfield was perhaps the best among the other principals. His Jupiter was decently if not very beautifully sung – I thought a slightly faster tempo would have been helpful in “Where’er you walk,” surely one of Handel’s most ravishing melodic inspirations. In the end, it was his music that really counted for most. The work itself is far from being one of his finest, but even when operating at half-power Handel is irresistible. Semele triumphantly survived all the directorial absurdities foisted on it, and the last hour of the Victoria company’s performance rose satisfyingly to its challenges and its opportunities.

Bernard Jacobson 

Pictures ©  David Cooper Photography

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