Last year the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Historical Performance Department gave us Handel's Flavio (my post is here), a rarity; this year it gave us his Serse, one of his more popular operas. Once again the performances were led by Corey Jamason from the harpsichord, leading the Conservatory's Baroque Ensemble. I heard the Saturday cast; I would have gone back for the Sunday afternoon cast but I had a conflict.
The Saturday performance was so enjoyable that I regretted not being able to go back & experience the production again through the prism of different performers. Once again, the staging is fairly minimal; the singers wear appropriate costumes & act out the roles in front of the orchestra, but the set is restricted to some large boxes that are useful for hiding behind, putting disguises in, & so forth. A witty touch in the costuming was that two lovers who will clearly end up together, Arsamene & Romilda, were both wearing purple; he was in a suit & she in a gown. So they were visually linked from the beginning, though the shades did not match exactly, reflecting the turbulent vacillations of their fancies.
The titular monarch, Serse (Xerxes), is the unstable core of a whirligig of romance. The opera famously opens with what used to be known as "Handel's Largo", the dulcet aria Ombra mai fu, in which the Emperor expresses his love for . . . a tree. It's apparently a very attractive tree. I think we can all sympathize, as spring is now bringing the fresh green leaves out on the twining branches. Most of the plot revolves around the Emperor's arbitrary decision to love or not to love, & the implicit threat to others in his power.
The other lovers are not really more stable, though less dangerous because less powerful. Serse's brother Arsamene is in love with Romilda, whom Serse decides he must have for his own (he thinks his brother's loves are as easily transplanted as his); Romilda is in love with Arsamene, but the two of them are subject to intense fits of jealousy, leading to much musical sniping. Romilda's sister Atalanta is in love with Arsamene, & tries to sabotage her sister's relationship with him whenever possible. There's also Amastre, a neighboring princess in love & promised to Serse, who arrives disguised rather dashingly as a man; Elviro, Arsamene's comic servant, & Ariodate, the well-meaning father of Romilda & Atalanta, round out the cast of characters. The sniping, the jealousy, the comical confusions about love, the underlying threat from an arbitrary power . . . despite baroque opera's reputation for rarefied silliness, the actions & emotional affects here strike me as much more life-like than the strained melodramas of the so-called "verismo" school of opera.
The whole cast was very strong. The title role was performed by mezzo-soprano Jordan McCready, with the confident air (& even physical aggression – s/he more or less playfully pushed people around physically as well as emotionally) of a supreme ruler. The exquisite lovers Arsamene & Romilda were performed by, respectively, countertenor Kyle Tingzon & soprano Camryn Finn. The conniving sister Atalanta was soprano Catherine Duncan. Mezzo-soprano Cambria Metzinger, looking stylish in her man's disguise of black leather boots & a hat with a large feather (quite jaunty for a despairing lover!) was the intense Amastre. Bass-baritone Joseph Calzada was quite funny as the servant Elviro, who would rather go off somewhere with a bottle of wine, & baritone Aaron Hong was the suavely blundering (to good effect) Ariodate. The orchestra gave lively shape to the music.
It's kind of amazing that so much work went into what was essentially a one-off performance (for the singers; the orchestra was of course the same for both performances). It's even more amazing that such a high level of performance was given to the public for free (as are many programs at the Conservatory): all you had to do to get a ticket was make a reservation. Kudos to the Conservatory for serving Handel & the public (& its students) so well.
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