Philharmonia Baroque: Handel's Tolomeo

One of the more exciting & unexpected developments in my now four decades plus of opera-going is the resurgence, not just in specialty festivals but in mainstream houses, of that expansive & rich body of work, once considered as extinct as the brontosaurus: baroque opera. Not surprisingly revival has come at an uneven rate, & while some works are well known, there are others, even by a giant like Handel, that are relatively obscure; such a one is Tolomeo, which Philharmonia Baroque revived this week. I saw the first performance, in Herbst Theater. Musically the piece was rich enough to satisfy any opera lover, especially with such a truly outstanding cast, but dramatically the semi-staged production by James Darrah Black was less satisfying.

PBO's new Music Director, Peter Whelan, led a lively & musically convincing performance, with a stellar cast of singers: countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in the title role, soprano Lauren Snouffer as his beloved wife Seleuce, countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim as his younger brother Alessandro, bass-baritone Dashon Burton as Araspe, king of Cyprus, & soprano Nicole Heaston as Elisa, his sister. The first three, members of the Egyptian royal family, are in exile or hiding or shipwrecked on Cyprus, & therefore to some extent under the power of Araspe & his sister. Complications romantic, dynastic, & familial inevitably ensue. There's no point in spelling them out; baroque operas have notoriously convoluted plots, but the action is generally clear enough in performance, & I will continue to insist that the shifting & often disguised layers of love, longing, & loss portrayed are psychologically & dramatically truer to life than the grand passions of verismo. As is usual in baroque opera, the characters were called on to display a wide variety of emotions (though Araspe was mostly restricted to the anger produced by rebuffed royal love, which Burton delivered with magisterial fury) & the cast was on-point, each time & in all moods; vocally, it was a glorious evening of glowing splendors.

Dramatically things were less certain. Here's one of the points at which vocalization & characterization intersect: Elisa's love for the disguised Tolomeo was portrayed in a comically overdone, almost camp, way. This is a legitimate choice, & Heaston played it extremely well, but it's not the choice I would have preferred. Once you've established Elisa as a comic character, with basically silly emotions rooted in the whims of an entitled princess, then halfway through the opera when her love turns to vengeful anger, it's difficult at that point to start taking those emotions seriously – and if her threats don't carry a sense of real danger with them, then the dramatic tension is really defused.

Also, there's a tendency to see baroque opera as lots of lovely tunes wrapped around a hollow core, emptied of significance, which I think diminishes what these works can actually accomplish for present-day listeners who are open to them. The conventions are already to start with alien enough for many modern audiences; turning them into campy comedy scenes is, I think, something that should be done very sparingly.

I said above that the basic action of baroque opera, however convoluted in the plot synopsis, is clear in performance, but I need to modify that a bit, as on Thursday night the basic story-telling was often unclear, though I'm familiar enough with what is likely to be going on to make educated guesses. At one point, if the characters themselves weren't narrating what they were seeing & doing ("Why is my beloved, who ungratefully doesn't love me, going over to that shepherd? Why is she speaking to him, a mere lowly shepherd? I will slay him!"), we would have been completely lost. During one aria Tolomeo was in front of Seleuce, who was singing about him, but apparently he was meant to be only in her thoughts (the usually lively & sensitive Cohen was stiff & withdrawn at those moments, which is why I think we were meant to "read" him as present only in her mind).

The ending was very confusing: Elisa has given Tolomeo a poison. I guessed that it would be some sort of narcotic sleeping potion, as it's unlike baroque opera to kill off the hero like that: the eighteenth century liked its happy endings; or, to put it in a more appropriately philosophical way, they liked to have order restored to & on the restless world before sending the audience out into the seething night. I was right about the sleeping potion. But Elisa has also announced that she's seen Seleuce slaughtered in front of her – but then the very much alive Seleuce is led in. Elisa doesn't even look surprised. What's going on? Afterwards I read the plot synopsis & it turns out that Alessandro, who has decided to do the right thing & restore his elder brother to the throne of Egypt, has rescued her. I think the libretto itself was a bit slapdash there, but the staging didn't help things.

The costumes didn't help either. Everyone was in vaguely contemporary outfits, mostly in those sort of wheat-ash-pale pale olive green-beige-taupe shades. At first I thought they all looked like models in a Banana Republic catalogue. Then I noticed there were some differences: the brothers Tolomeo & Alessandro both wore stylish hiking boots (which I envied), while Araspe had very polished black dress shoes. His shirt was black, though his linen suit was pale ash-grey or off-white or some other evanescent shade, & his sister also wore black, though her outfit was also topped with a pale jacket. Seleuce wore a lovely pale (yellowish?) sundress & then partway through switched to a different lovely pale (greenish?) sundress; I don't know why she changed. Were Alessandro's earrings & painted nails part of the characterization, or just the personal style of the singer? (Or both?) And I don't know how some of these distinctions (like the footwear) would be seen if you weren't sitting in the front row, as I was, so I don't know quite what was going on there. I don't really need characters dressed like "shepherds" or "kings" but it's helpful to paint some of these differences in broader strokes & brighter colors, & it might be helpful if characters in disguise have some sort of rudimentary, even symbolic, disguise; otherwise you may well wonder why someone is looking directly at the beloved spouse he or she has been pining for in aria after aria yet does not recognize said beloved. There's suspending belief, & then there's asking for the impossible.

On either side of the stage there were what looked like parts of a wrecked plane, built out of wood, half-buried in sand. These weren't really used, & were meant to indicate that Tolomeo had crash-landed on Cyprus, or at least I think that's what they meant. Stretched along the front of the stage were fluorescent tubes on wooden blocks, which were moved into different shapes on occasion (& the bulbs changed colors sometimes). In the middle of the stage, behind the row of lights, there were some wooden boxes covered with some sort of foam insulation & tied down with ropes. These were eventually removed, & used to tie up a character, & inside the wooden boxes there were large mirrored cubes, which came out in the last half & were stared at by various characters for long periods.

This was an interesting idea, & multivalent enough to be intriguing: was the staring literally a reflection of their narcissism? In the director's note, which I read afterwards, there is a suggestion that even the reflection of a face can't convey everything that face signifies or that that person has gone through. There was a comic edge sometimes: the first person to stare into the mirrored cube was Elisa, & the action seemed in line with her self-indulgent vanity (I couldn't help thinking of Semele in her Handel opera, staring into a mirror & singing Myself I shall adore, if I persist in gazing). Afterwards an audience member who seemed delighted with the mirrored cubes referred to them as the characters' cellphones (because everyone kept staring into them obliviously), & you could follow that line of thought too, satirically &/or seriously. (But I should probably also note that the reflections off the mirrored cubes repeatedly hurt my eyes.)

There were some striking stage pictures, so much so that the man next to me took several surreptitious photos (he was actually not nearly as annoying as the couple behind me who frequently whispered & then emitted a round of high-pitched giggles). The staging was at its best when it worked on a symbolic, poetic, signifying level, which is where the striking stage pictures would come in; where it fell down was with the basic what is going on here stuff. I do know people who just don't even bother trying to follow the plot twists & emotional complexities, but just bask in the music, &, you know, sure, there are many mansions &c, but for these wonderful works to maintain their newfound theatrical vitality, at some level they need to make sense & be taken seriously. It sounds prosaic, even banal, even, oh horror, literalist & low-brow, to insist that the action should be clear, but it's especially important in a work as little-known as this one. If you mess around with Tosca, some people will have a fit (I am definitely not one of them), but a large part of the audience will know what you're playing around with. That's not the case with Tolomeo.

Having said all that, I have to go back to swimming in the musical glories of the evening. Even if I didn't love Handel & baroque opera as much as I do, just the chance to hear the vivid orchestral playing & the endlessly glorious unfurling singing would have been enough. I wonder if anyone made a surreptitious recording to go with my neighbor's photos?

the glory of the Glory of Spring

Last Sunday night I was in Berkeley's First Congregational Church for the first performance in centuries of Alessandro Scarlatti's La Gloria di Primavera, written in 1716 to celebrate the birth of a male heir to Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor. The boy (the little baby Archduke Leopold) died a few months later and the serenata was shelved. Scarlatti died nine years later, Charles VI died twenty-three years later, the Holy Roman Empire expired ninety years later, and the manuscript lay there through it all, waiting for Professor Benedikt Poensgen to rediscover it and Philharmonia Baroque to bring it back to life.

Little Leopold was born in spring, which was the inspiration (though that is probably not the right word for the adequate and overlong libretto) by Abbate Nicolo Giovo. The seasons gather to debate which of them deserves the most credit for helping in the production of the Hero-baby, because now that he is born war will give way to peace. (This part is not entirely hyperbole; there had been several wars related to the Hapsburg claims to various thrones, and the hope was that Leopold's birth would prevent another one. As it happened, his early death meant that another war of succession had to be fought to place his sister Maria Theresa on the throne, an historical fact that gave the libretto an occasional depth of poignant irony unearned by its intentions.) Anyway Jove shows up in the second half and eventually (spoiler alert!) gives the palm to Spring as the season of actual birth.

The piece itself is like one of those baroque ceilings that are officially about The Apotheosis of X or the Triumph of Something Good Over Something Not As Good; what really makes you spend hours straining your neck staring up is not the official program but the mad extravagance of ornament, the swirling lights and shades, the glowing draperies, the fruits and flowers, insects and birds crammed in just for the pleasure of their company, the heedless and generous magnificence of the whole thing. Scarlatti's music is like that, cloaking the libretto's sycophantic conceits in a sumptuous flow of varied invention. Most of the music is at a high level of liveliness – a trumpets-sounding sort of thing – and as such it certainly plays to the jaunty strengths of conductor Nicolas McGegan and his band.

The singers were also consistently strong. It would be difficult to single out a favorite from among Nicholas Phan's virile tenor, the mellifluous self-satisfaction of baritone Douglas Williams's Jove, the limpid countertenor of Clint van der Linde, or the glowing harmonies of mezzo-soprano Diana Moore and soprano Suzana Ograjenšek.

As you may have gathered, I was not a big fan of the libretto, which doesn't really rise above its praise-of-the-ruling-caste genre. For us it's little more than an excuse for the orchestra and singers to do their thing, from imitating the Danube's flow to praising peace. I'm all in favor of peace, and flowing rivers: so does the libretto actually matter in any significant way? There is one thing: it goes on too long. Scarlatti's inventiveness never lags, and neither did the performers' energies, but the audience's might have. The concert lasted nearly three hours (though that does include an absurdly long intermission), which is not unusual for a big vocal work from the baroque period but is maybe not what any of us were expecting (even PBO; the program book said the run-time was "about two hours" and I assume they would have had the sense to start earlier than 7:30 if they had known the length of the piece; of course there is no performance history for them to go by). When it got to be 10:00 several people just got up and left (there was no libretto in the program, so there was no way of knowing how much longer it would last). It's too bad, since there was so much pleasure to be had from the performance. But I'll admit – though I'm abashed at how bourgie and Philistine it makes me feel, and sound –  that my spirits sank a bit when I realized how little sleep I was going to get before the alarm clock went off for Monday morning. It's just another argument for more rational start times that better fit the way we have to live now. Aristocrats in Naples didn't have these problems.

There are still some performances left (7 October at Stanford, 9 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, and 10 October back in First Congregational in Berkeley) so if you are able to get to one you will have a splendid time and hear something old yet new. (Tickets are available here.) Even better news is that PBO is recording the piece and will release it a few months from now on their house label. The weakness of the libretto and the unexpected length of the concert don't really matter when it comes to a recording; this is definitely one to be on the lookout for. I assume they'll have to patch together the different concerts, since  despite numerous reminders that a live recording was going on, there were a few eruptions of hacking coughs, and a brief period of unexpected laughter when the houselights suddenly dimmed and then went back up during the performance. I don't actually know why that was considered funny, but a lot of people laughed. McGegan shrugged insouciantly and kept on. I would have preferred having the houselights down the whole time, anyway. It looked intensely dramatic and concentrated attention. And we did not need to look at the words in our programs because they used supertitles. I assume that was to reduce page-turning and paper-rustling during the recording but it was a welcome innovation no matter what the reason.

Philharmonia Baroque: Trauermusik

Last Sunday I stood under the brick arches of First Congregational Church in Berkeley, waiting for my concert companion, watching the clouds scud by over the tulip trees and wondering if it would rain again. From an inner room I could hear the ethereal ululations of a singer warming up. I was there for Philharmonia Baroque's excursion down an interesting and somewhat obscure byway of the German baroque: mourning music, mostly from assorted lesser Bachs. But before the Bachs there was a brief but dignified sinfonia from George Philipp Telemann's Schwanengesang, written for the funeral of the Mayor of Hamburg. Wind instruments flowed gracefully over the striding strings. If you know the Handel Sarabande used to great effect in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon: it was similar to that in its effect of dignified mourning.

After that orchestral prelude, we heard Johann Christoph Bach's Herr, wende dich und sei mir gnädig (Lord, turn unto me and have mercy upon me). This Bach was a cousin of the father of Johann Sebastian Bach. Right before the piece conductor Nicholas McGegan announced a slight change in soloists: soprano Sherezade Panthaki would sing in the upcoming Trauermusik, the major piece on the program, but in the J C Bach cantata we would hear soprano Tonia D'Amelio, normally found in the chorus, as "a sinful Lutheran." The other soloists were countertenor Clifton Massey, tenor Brian Thorsett, and baritone Jeffrey Fields. Actually, they were all sinful Lutherans except the baritone, who responded to their anguished psalms with a rather jolly assurance that his grace would save them. All the soloists were very fine, and I enjoyed D'Amelio's chance to shine as a soloist. I think the acoustics in that venue don't favor the lower voices (my concert companion was quite firm on this subject); both in the chorus and among the soloists the higher voices resounded more powerfully than the lower. There's always a bit of a halo around the voices in First Congregational, which I guess is not inappropriate for a church.

The major piece on the program was the three-part Trauermusik (Mourning Music), composed for a ducal funeral by Johan Ludwig Bach, a distant cousin of J S Bach. It's a big, extravagant piece, and I'm surprised it's not better known. In addition to the four soloists, there is a double choir and of course the orchestra. Although the Biblical texts (adapted from Job, Psalms, Isaiah, and 2 Corinthians) are appropriately serious, with a mind to the heavenly life  presumably now being enjoyed by the duke being buried, the elaborate, thoughtful music speaks well of the pleasures available in this world. PBO did a pleasing, energetic job, their customary jauntiness subdued into a more appropriately funereal grace. I was glad for a chance to hear this little-known piece live; there seems to be only one recording, and I hope PBO is making one to add to their growing discography.

Suitably enough the rain returned briefly just as we left the church; a swift shower pounced on us and then moved on, leaving the streets slick with wet again, shining with jagged streetlight reflections.

Next up for Philharmonia Baroque is an all-Vivaldi concert featuring visiting violinist Rachel Podger; I've heard her play with them before, and this is sure to be a delightful concert. That's 11 - 15 March and you can get more information here.

Profane and Sacred with Philharmonia Baroque

Philharmonia Baroque started its season with two enjoyable concerts, both of which I attended in Berkeley, at First Congregational. Each concert offered an opportunity to hear a renowned soloist as well as the excellent local talent.

First up was cellist Steven Isserlis, who joined the band for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Concerto for Violoncello in A major, Wq 172 and then, after the intermission, Boccherini's Concerto for Violoncello No. 7 in G major, G. 480. Those were flanked by two Haydn symphonies: No. 57 in D major to open, and No. 67 in F major to close. The symphonies were crisp and vivid under Nicholas McGegan's direction, but the centerpiece was the two cello concertos. They were recording the Haydn, and asked us to be particularly quiet because of the recording, so of course someone unleashed her hacking cough through both. I wonder if they got anything usable.

Isserlis is a very dramatic player. I enjoyed watching him. He has long, curly grey hair, which he tosses back regularly. During the break my concert companion overheard two old ladies having the following discussion about the concert: "Well, he's had a haircut." "Yes, but he needs another one." Sometimes I wonder if people say things like that because the emotions summoned by music are too intimate to be shared and possibly spoiled by opening them to the air. Other times I think that's just all there is, right there on the surface – they're there for the hair – and it gives me a chuckle.

For whatever reason the playbill listed the concertos in one order and they were performed in reverse; I had heard about this from some of the earlier concerts and by the time I was actually listening I could not remember which we were going to hear first. They were clearly very different pieces of music, though – it was only the names that I couldn't remember. Isserlis spoke a bit before the Boccherini, describing it as "the spirit of the rococo" and very different from the more complex and adventurous CPE Bach piece. Indeed it was lighter, more curly in sound if you see what I mean, and the orchestra was all or almost entirely strings. The violoncello was Boccherini's own instrument, and he wrote himself a delightful showpiece.

The second concert featured countertenor Andreas Scholl and was conducted by Julian Wachner, who also led SF Opera's Partenope. At first glance (at least my first glance) the program seemed sort of an odd though enjoyable jumble: it opened with the Sinfonia from JS Bach's Cantata No. 42, BWV 42, followed by Scholl singing three Handel arias (Va tacito from Giulio Cesare, Dove sei from Rodelinda, and Aure, deh, per pietà from Giulio Cesare), followed by Telemann's Concerto in F major for Violin, Oboe, and Two Horns, TWV 54:F1. After the intermission, Scholl returned for Bach's Cantata No. 170, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170, and then the Brandenburg Concerto No 1 to close. But it turns out there were several interesting organizational ideas guiding the selections: one was to join three giants of baroque music for compare and contrast purposes and another was to draw attention to some spiritual principles guiding Bach's music. For example, the argument is that though familiarity with the Brandenburg Concertos and unfamiliarity with baroque standards may blunt the point for most of us, the instrumentation in the Brandenburgs is unexpected and a reversal of the usual, illustrating the gospel precepts that the first shall be last and the last first. We were to contrast the Brandenburg that closed the second half with the Telemann that closed the first half, a gorgeous but more strictly correct composition. We were also to hear the connections between the Brandenburg and the cantatas, and contrast the spiritual yearning of the latter with the more world-directed loss and pain in the Handel arias.

Scholl was, not surprisingly, wonderful, with a clear, sweet, full sound. The exemplary players of the natural horn also got quite a workout in this concert; the lead horn, RJ Kelley, spoke at one point and explained why the inside of the horn's bell was painted a dark color: it was because the instruments originated as hunting horns, and because of the way the horn was held (or, more accurately, worn), the inside had to be painted a dark color so that the sun's glare off the metal didn't startle the horse behind, causing him to rear and throw his rider. Fun facts about baroque life! As for the Brandenburg No 1, it reminded me once again how wonderful it can be to hear a work we think we know, after it's been long absent from our ears and even memories. It was an exhilarating jaunt, and they could have retitled it borrowing from one of our contemporary composers: a short ride in a fast machine.

Philharmonia Baroque's next concerts are this week; they're celebrating Christmas with Vivaldi and Zelenka. Check here for details; these sound like fun and unusual concerts.

Pergolesi in Naples in Berkeley

Sunday was one of those unpleasantly hot days that smear through the occasional week here in the Bay Area. Fortunately it had cooled down by the time I arrived at First Congregational Church in Berkeley for the last concert in the first series of Philharmonia Baroque's new, thirty-third, season. Each concert this year concentrates on a particular city; last night it was Naples, with an emphasis on Pergolesi, though Handel also made an appearance, thanks to his stay in that musically influential city, as did Francesco Durante, Pergolesi's teacher. The centerpiece was in the second half, Pergolesi's famous Stabat Mater. Nicholas McGegan conducted.

The first half was framed by orchestral pieces, opening with the sinfonia from Pergolesi's opera L'Olimpiade, and closing with Durante's Concerto for Strings No. 2 in G minor. There were not actually all that many players up on the stage, but they produce an opulent, full sound. I enjoyed the coruscating elegancies of the baroque. There was a pause after the first piece, when a couple of latecomers were seated. The concert started at 7:30, but really would have been better off starting at 7:00, for the benefit of those of us who have not yet reached the bliss of retirement. Handel vocal selections came as the creamy filling between the orchestral numbers.

David Daniels and Carolyn Sampson were the soloists. Daniels is of course well known, the standard bearer and the standard for a generation of countertenors. He was in rich voice last night. But like the flighty lively crowds of Naples pleasure-seekers that McGegan invoked (at least in my mind) at the start of the concert, I was swept up by what was new to me, so with no disrespect intended to Daniels I'm going to go on about Sampson. If I've heard her before, it's been on recordings where I didn't really pay attention to the list of singers (which is not unusual for me; sorry, I'm generally more about composer and work). She was sensational, with a beautiful limpid soprano. She's an attractive blonde with a glam presence; she came out in a long dark red gown with black trim and a sparkling necklace. The dress was strapless and my first thought was, She looks great but I hope she puts a shawl on before the Stabat Mater, so I guess the Carmelite Sisters of Charity who taught in my grammar school did their work well. (To put you out of your suspense right now, she came out for the second half with a black bolero jacket over her dress, looking still stylish but also appropriate – well done!)

Daniels and Sampson sang two Handel duets, with a solo apiece in between. First was Io t'abbraccio from Rodelinda, followed by Daniels in Dove sei from the same opera; then Sampson sang Da tempeste from Giulio Cesare, followed by Caro/Bella from the same opera. It was all very satisfying but Sampson's solo turn was for me the highlight; she not only sang beautifully but she caught the character of Cleopatra perfectly; this was a woman for whom flirting was like breathing, with a pleasing teasing tone. The lively extravagance of her ornamentation in the repeats was quite seductive.

Obviously a different tone was called for after the intermission, with the lyrical passion of the Stabat Mater, the antique prayer meditating upon Mary's suffering at the foot of the cross. There was more program rustling for this part, which was unfortunate though expected. Oddly the program had the first stanza of the poem on the bottom of the same page that had the aria texts, though there was plenty of room to put the entire text with translation of the Stabat Mater on the next two pages, which would have reduced the rustling. Even better would be to use supertitles. The performance flowed swiftly, with fluid intensity. We were nearing the end ("Fac ut portem Christi mortem, / passionis fac me sortem / et plagas recolere" : "Grant that I may bear the death of Christ, / grant me the fate of His passion / and the remembrance of His wounds") when a fairly powerful earthquake jolted the building. A momentary look of panic spread across some faces but the performers carried on without a pause. On the whole, the evening was a sumptuous immersion in the warmth of the Italian baroque. The next city, to be explored 15 - 19 November, is an unusual and interesting choice for a baroque ensemble: St Petersburg. Check it out here, especially if you're one of those looking for new adventures in old music.

Teseo, take two

Sunday afternoon I went to First Congregational Church in Berkeley to hear Philharmonia Baroque's performance of Handel's opera Teseo, conducted by Nicolas McGegan, with Amy Freston as Agilea, Dominique Labelle as Medea, Amanda Forsythe as Teseo, Drew Minter as Egeo, Robin Blaze as Arcane, Celine Ricci as Clizia, and Jeffrey Fields as the Priest of Minerva.

I had seen Teseo on stage once before, in 1985 at the Boston Early Music Festival, with McGegan conducting and staging the work (Drew Minter was also in that production, though he has risen in rank from the confidante Arcane up to King Egeo). I have some vivid memories of the show, even though it was almost thirty years ago. It was staged in the baroque style, with elaborate period-appropriate machinery carrying chosen characters on and off and up from the scene, and with sudden transformations (from garden to desert and back again), and supernatural apparitions (the cast in the playbill includes Gale Ormiston as a Horrid Monster). It was the first time I saw a baroque wave machine in action. But though a baroque audience might have seen something that looked similar, the context is different, and what looked striking and magical to them tends to look charming and quaint to us. I recall the Globe review criticizing a certain - I believe the word used was "campy" - quality, though that may have been directed specifically at the Medea, Nancy Armstrong, who had a lovely crystalline voice but was not a physically imposing stage presence; I think her efforts at stylized eighteenth-century gestures did not quite succeed in conveying danger and menace. And these operas, despite their fanciful plots, do contain real dangers and real menaces, and unless you convey those qualities seriously the operas don't quite come through. But on the whole I found it a very enjoyable evening, and it's remained such in my memory.

Some of my patience and stamina have vanished over the years, and honestly as I walked into an overly warm First Congo on Sunday, with the late afternoon sun striking directly into my eyes when I sat in my otherwise very fine seat, I wasn't sure, although Handel has always been one of my favorite composers, that I was really up for three and a half hours of him. Well, this is why we show up for these things: the performance was Philharmonia Baroque at its best. The sun sank low enough to spare my eyes and the time flew by, with consistently rich and intent playing from the orchestra and exceptionally fine singing all around; aria after aria flashed by like jewels tumbling from a dropped box.

The acoustics for singers can be tricky in that space but this time they seem to have found the sweet spot. There was an elevated platform (I think it was constructed over the altar) where the action took place, and the orchestra was clustered below and in front of the platform in a cohesive group, with the front row turned toward the conductor at the harpsichord (rather than to the audience). Sometimes I have felt that the staging at PBO can become too jokey, in a way that mocks the material; I don't really understand laughing at a literary/musical/theatrical style just because it's different from ours. This time around that problem was generally avoided, and the staging mostly fit the sophisticated humor of the piece (though there was the occasional bizarre moment - did Teseo really offer Medea some cash when he thought she was helping him to win his beloved Agilea? Or was the sun dazzling my vision?). The comic by-play was mostly charming and appropriate, as when Agilea swung her elaborate gown in gentle time with her woodwind obbligato.

The story certainly has its comedy, but it's a sophisticated Ariosto-style comedy, to go with the Ariosto-like plotline; it's a tale of romantic confusion, longing, faith, and jealousy among kings, heroes, and enchantresses, and though love ends up fairly triumphant, first the lovers must survive the horrid monsters and other malevolent spirits summoned up by the spiteful Medea. The various enchantments were left to our imagination, which was probably just as well. But the scenes were otherwise all vividly acted out, with entrances and exits (as opposed to singers sitting in a row, rising when their roles called for it). The men wore black suits and open-necked white shirts, and the women eighteenth-century-looking gowns, with Agilea and Clizia in soft patterned shades and Medea in severe scarlet. Amanda Forsythe in the castrato role of Teseo wore white pants with a long white tunic over a white shirt. She was obviously a woman, but you got the point.

The singers were uniformly strong. Jeffrey Fields was commanding in the small deux ex machina role of Minerva's priest. I had not been crazy about Celine Ricci's voice last time she was with PBO (possibly in Athalia?); I found something metallic about it; but this time I found it beautiful. Robin Blaze lived up to his surname, particularly in his first aria in the second half, Benche tuoni e l'estra avvampi (Although it thunders, and the sky is lit up, a lover's heart will not be afraid). I used to hear Drew Minter fairly often when I lived in Boston, but I have not heard him live for a very long time (though I did enjoy his recent CD). I was pleased to hear that the years had darkened a bit but not diminished the beauty of his voice. Amanda Forsythe was graceful and appealing as Teseo, and Dominique Labelle was vivid and forceful as Medea. But Amy Freston made perhaps the deepest impression as Agilea, with her sensitive and deeply felt portrayal of a woman struggling towards her love.

My program from the 1985 production, which McGegan signed for me during the intermission of this performance (it reads After 28 years I finally get to sign it / very best wishes / Nicholas McGegan)

All in all, one of PBO's more memorable performances, and quite an end to their season; check here to see what they have planned for their next one.

I have now seen Teseo live more often than I have seen Ariadne auf Naxos, Manon Lescaut, or Otello; such are the vagaries, wonders, and byways of a life spent viewing performances.

in the bleak midwinter

The last performance I went to in 2012, though not the last I will be posting about, was Philharmonia Baroque's all-Bach concert, conducted by Masaaki Suzuki. I was at the Sunday concert in First Congregational Church in Berkeley, whose clean New England lines only reinforce for me the plunge-into-the-past quality of hearing baroque music in a church on a brisk winter night; I spent many evenings like that long ago when I lived in Boston. Hearing Bach under such circumstances is for me a regular Currier and Ives print of a horse-drawn sleigh sliding through a snow-bound little town. Very Christmassy, if you were in the mood to take it as such.

The first half of the program was the Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068 (the piece with the famous "Air on the G string" so beloved of those who compile discs with titles like "Greatest Hits of the Baroque!") and Cantata No. 63, Christen, atzet diesen Tag (Christians, etch this day); the second half was the Magnificat in E-flat major, BWV 243a. ("Oh, look," the man behind me announced. "This one has words!") The celebratory cantata and Mary's poem of praise and acceptance of the Lord's will both relate to Christmas without being indissolubly linked to the season, which was the brilliance of the program; you could take it as a holiday concert, or, if you preferred, as a general reminder of the pleasures of Bach. Suzuki led a rich and ebullient performance of the works; the orchestral suite gleamed like dark gold. The vocalists in the other pieces were excellent, chorus as well as soloists: soprano Sherezade Panthaki, whose voice was so large it even eclipsed the woman coughing in the back; Claire Kelm, second soprano in the Magnificat; mezzo-soprano Fabiana Gonzalez; dignified bass-baritone Dashon Burton, and tenor Dann Coakwell, whose joy in performing was infectious. All in all, a very pleasing way to end the year's concert-going.

PBO's next concerts, 13-17 February, feature one of Bach's sons, Johann Christian Bach, along with Haydn and Mozart, in an exploration of classical style.

Restoration Romans

Last night I was back at First Congregational Church in Berkeley for Purcell's Dioclesian, the fourth and final performance of the first concert of the season for Philharmonia Baroque. Like King Arthur or The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian (just this once I will give the work its more formal title: The Prophetess; or, The History of Dioclesian) is one of those "semi-operas" in which a spoken-word play is interlarded with musical material of a striking and delightful and mostly tangentially relevant nature and then the whole thing is bound together with elaborate spectacle, using as much of the newest technology and as many of the oldest tricks as were available to theaters in the late seventeenth century (you know, the form works beautifully for Ariadne auf Naxos. . . ). Such works are by general consensus completely resistant to revival, and perhaps that's true based on time alone (last night's performance of the music was a bit over two hours, including intermission; I can only imagine the Einstein-on-the-Beach lengths it would reach if the evening also included actors playing out elaborate intrigues in the court of the later Roman emperors, let alone the time needed to switch sets and activate the stage machinery). But it wasn't so long ago that general consensus held that baroque opera, in its original form, was also resistant to revival, and now even the mighty Met has had to acknowledge the dramatic genius of Handel. So who knows? There was a revival of the complete Fairy Queen a few years back, which I understand was wonderful (there is a DVD, which I have not seen).

The Fairy Queen does have the advantage of playing off well-known material (A Midsummer Night's Dream) which is still a theatrical staple. Dioclesian, based on a play by Fletcher and Massinger that uses the classical past to comment on the political struggles of seventeenth-century England, is a harder sell to non-specialists. The music remains excellent, and easily survives the abandonment of its original container, and with all plot summaries and narrative threads and political allegories wisely left in the program book for those who cared to pursue them there, what PBO gave us last night was just the music, a grab-bag of baroque thrills and splendors: stately marches, lively dances, graceful solos, flirting shepherds and shepherdesses, drunken gods, and grand choruses, and songs of war and love. There were particularly striking contributions from Katherine Adduci on trumpet and Hanneke van Proosdij and Stephen Bard on recorder. The whole band, led by Music Director Nicholas McGegan, was in great form, but you know you tend to get noticed more with the martial trumpet or the amorous flute, while the flowing strings bravely play in workaday semi-anonymity. The soloists were fine (Helene Zindarsian, Jean-Paul Jones, Clifton Massey, Brian Thorsett, Jonathan Smucker, Jeff Fields, and John Bischoff) and helped swell the sound of the  chorus, which produced mighty effects greater than its relatively small size.

So the first half of the concert was pretty much sheer delight as far as I was concerned. The second half: maybe a bit less so, for a variety of reasons. The first hour had been the music from Acts 1 through 4. After a fairly lengthy intermission, we had the music from Act 5, which was an elaborate masque almost as long as the preceding four acts put together. The Act 5 masque was celebrated in its own time and often revived as a set-piece, but I suspect what really distinguished the masque for its contemporaries was the fanciful and intricate staging more than anything else. I did wonder if Purcell maybe realized that the scenery was going to be the memorable star of the masque no matter what the rest of them did. and though the music is consistently enjoyable it is pretty much enjoyable in the same manner as the rest of the work (though there's nothing in either half as striking as, say, the awakening of Winter in King Arthur), and towards the end I was experiencing the physical dip I usually experience at that time of evening, and was feeling I had had perhaps enough. And after the intermission the man to my left must have been sitting an inch closer to me, because he kept obliviously brushing against me with his sleeve - such are the hazards of concert-going and pew-seating, and the little things that add up to our experience.

And then, after behaving in the first half, the singers started joking it up, grimacing and striking absurd poses and glaring and flirting with each other in a campy way. I've seen enough PBO concerts at this point to realize this is sort of a house style, and is liable to erupt randomly in unsuitable places, but I wish they would stop it. The pastoral names (Corinna, Mirtillo) may seen bizarrely affected to us (well, to those of us who haven't read much seventeenth century verse), but their dramatic truths remain alive, though expressed in an idiom strange to us, and the ironies in the material would come across better if they were played straight. To me the effect is to trivialize and mock the piece, and if you feel that way, why are you performing it? (And I did notice more noise among the audience in the second half; during the first half they had been notably attentive.) Anyway in the larger scheme of things these were relatively minor irritants, and as I said, the first half was a total pleasure, and I was glad of the opportunity to hear this relative rarity live.

Alexander's Feast

A few weeks ago at First Congregational Church in Berkeley I heard Philharmonia Baroque’s performance of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Musick, conducted by Nicholas McGegan. It’s a setting of Dryden’s poem, in which the banquet entertainment for Alexander the Great after he conquers Persia is a series of varied set pieces used by the musician Timotheus to control the conqueror’s emotional temperature. The ode then ends with a sudden switch to a later time and place, praising the superiority of St Cecilia’s heavenly music. It all sounds very random, like a baroque variety show, but it all flows smoothly and makes perfect emotional sense.

This work was I think one of the first Handel works I bought, so it’s only now, in describing how the ode moves, that I realized how random it is when it is described as a story rather than experienced as music. Hearing various recordings so many times engraves the work on your mind and it takes only a few notes to summon up entire sections which then recede back into memory. That can be a lot for a live performance to work against, but this one sure worked on me because I found the whole evening quite delightful. I have sometimes felt that Philharmonia Baroque tends to be too bouncy and cheerful in a way that slights the darker and grander side of Handel, but the grim and sad sections came through as grim and sad, though perhaps not enough for my companion, who announced afterward that they were all smiling too much up there.

The soloists were all very good. Dominique Labelle was quite sweet and then charmingly flirtatious as she teased out the lines describing how the prince “sigh’d and look’d, sigh’d and look’d, / Sigh’d and look’d, and sigh’d again.” Baritone Philip Cutlip sat oddly separated from the others, perhaps because he had the songs about such less sociable activities as drunkenness and revenge. My favorite part was the ringing tenor of Dann Coakwell.

There were a couple of odd minor mistakes in the program: the libretto says “Words by Newburgh Hamilton” but two pages earlier Scott Foglesong’s program note makes it clear that Hamilton only arranged John Dryden’s work. It seems odd to omit reference on the equivalent of a title page to the man who actually wrote the words. And in the program note Darius is described as Alexander’s father. Philip II of Macedon was Alexander’s father; Darius was father of Xerxes. Interestingly (though also irrelevantly), the ghost of Darius plays the same role as a reminder of fallen glory in what is probably the earliest surviving play in the western canon, Persians by Aeschylus.

Anyway, as I said I enjoyed the evening very much. I’d like to thank Philharmonia Baroque for the very excellent seats (my friend wondered why I was given such good seats; I told him that apparently no one important wanted them, which was lucky for us). I was especially grateful because a month or two before the concert, since I really wanted to hear this piece, I went on-line to buy a ticket and was frankly stunned by the extremely high prices. (To put the cost in some perspective, I heard three concerts by Magnificat for less than the price of one decent seat for this performance.) The thing is, I can think of many reasons why they would set those prices, but not so many reasons to justify my paying them. Their concerts are, in my experience, very well attended, so clearly lots of people can afford their tickets, but as far as I personally am concerned they’ve priced themselves out of the market. I don’t mean to sound crass by ending my reminiscence of aesthetic delight with a complaint about money, but here’s where bloggers and other nonprofessional reviewers can offer a perspective you can't get from professionals, who are used to receiving complimentary tickets. Professional reviewers talking about ticket prices is like a celibate clergy talking about birth control: they’re entitled to their opinion, but it’s not based on any personal risk. I feel a little awkward expressing sticker shock since I was given tickets, but I do feel I needed to mention it.

Dido dances

The Cal Performances season opened this week with the annual visit of the Mark Morris Dance Group, in a revival of Morris’s 1989 classic, Dido and Aeneas. Philharmonia Baroque played Purcell’s music. I was at last night's performance.

I have seen Dido several times, but only when Morris was still dancing Dido/the Sorceress; sometimes it is part of a double-bill and sometimes it’s on its own. Both methods work; it certainly is a rich enough hour on its own, but it worked strangely well coupled with the company’s shortened version of 4 Saints in 3 Acts (though I think they did 4 Saints first; I would have reversed the order, so that you had earthly suffering followed by heavenly joy). The first time I saw Dido it was a stand-alone and it must have been shortly after the Belgian premiere.

I think the most recent time was also a season opener for Cal Performances. I saw it twice in that run, and it was fascinating to see how Morris adjusted his performance for the second night – the first night there had been a pre-performance party for donors and maybe people had too much wine, since there was some laughter at what were seen as Morris’s more flamboyant gestures (I liked having a man dancing Dido and the Sorceress because of the link to ancient Greek tragic theater, but I am relentlessly aesthetic and high-minded and there’s always the danger some people are going to assume it’s meant purely as camp, if you can describe camp as "pure"). The next night, all the gestures that evoked laughter were made sharper and more angular and there was no laughter.

Morris has transitioned to conductor of the piece, shaping an alert and well-paced performance from Philharmonia Baroque (though for some reason the pauses between scenes struck me as held just a bit too long; as always, though, I can’t rule out that I was just being weird). The piece survives and triumphes with its second generation of dancers. Domingo Estrada Jr was a virile and sensitive Aeneas, expressing both a lover’s suffering at abandoning Dido and a leader’s recognition that he must move on with his troops (it’s quite an achievement, particularly in this short and Dido-centered opera, to make Aeneas this sympathetic; we are empire-dwellers but like to pretend that love is the obvious choice over duty).

Amber Star Merkens was a perfect choice to take over Morris’s role; in fact she somewhat resembles the younger Morris (particularly in her flowing tangle of dark curls, which she ties back for Dido and loosens for the Sorceress, just as Morris did), though I think she’s taller, leaner, and more sinewy. (Maile Okamura was nicely contrasted as a daintier, sympathetic Belinda.) Merkens makes little gestures count for a lot, as in her final confrontation with Aeneas, as the tender slight movement of her hand (to “by all that’s good”) gives way to the injured dignity of “it’s enough that once you thought of leaving me.” Her Dido is regal and moving. Her Sorceress is cynical and nihilistic and amused. She’s dazzling in both roles.

Stephanie Blythe certainly provided the vocal equivalent, with a beautiful, hall-filling voice, so expressively used, particularly in the suicide aria at the end, when Blythe and Merkens together indelibly expressed Dido’s sorrow and dignity and beauty. Philip Cutlip was distinguished as Aeneas, but had a few slight vocal bobbles. The other soloists (Yulia Van Doren as Belinda, and the First Witch Celine Ricci as the Second Woman and the Second Witch, and Brian Thorsett as the Sailor) were all strong. The chorus was very good and actually enunciated more clearly than some of the soloists (of course, I was sitting right in front of them, my view of the stage slightly blocked by the rising curl of the cello; such are the hazards of preferring the front row).

When Dido and Aeneas touch, it is briefly, and often at a distance from each other (arms extended, space between). The Sorceress is isolated, even from her attendants (Noah Vinson and Dallas McMurray), except for one moment, when she reaches the climax of her evil plan to destroy Dido, and they jump up on her, one on either side, and balance for a moment of glee. Usually she disdains even them, and is clearly and amusingly bored by their baroque repetitions and repulsed when they or any of her attendants come too close to her. We see Dido and Aeneas make love, but we see the Sorceress masturbate alone while her attendants scamper behind her; afterwards she wipes her finger with a bored “well, that’s over” expression. It's profoundly moving to see royal Dido's suicide brought about by this solitary hater of human joy, and a rich connection to have one dancer play both parts.

The setting is stripped down, with a vague blue and gray map of the Mediterranean glowing palely as backdrop to the Carthage scenes, reminding us that Aeneas has to go off and found Rome, and with black banners streaming down for the Sorceress. The dancers' movements are frieze-like and angular and often resemble classical Greek vase paintings. Even many of the movements in a line proceed at an angle. But then there are odd jittery moments thrown in, or little crude jokes, reminding us that more is going on here than an attempt to recreate the vanished (and partly unknowable) style of the Greek tragedies.

The gender ambiguity continues, with the corps, both men and women, portraying female attendants, male sailors, and in-between witches. (The Sailor’s solo is jauntily danced by Lauren Grant.) They do this by switching their black skirts to black pantaloons (I don't know if they just hitch them up or whip them off; their tank tops are always black). Some of the men have slightly crimsoned lips and gold hoop earrings. Dido has glittery silver nails and Aeneas’s nails are black.

At the end the stage slowly darkens as the attendants slip off in pairs through the curtain center stage, behind the dead queen prone on the bench facing us, her head bowed down towards us and arms extended out on either side. Belinda remains and takes a seat on the right side of the bench near her dead sister, and bows her head as the stage reaches almost total darkness.

good news from the archives

The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra is marking its thirtieth anniversary by launching its own record label, Philharmonia Baroque Productions, and they are very wisely leading off with a treasure from their archives: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who had a long association with the group, recorded live in 1995 singing Les Nuits d'Ete and Handel arias. The release date is March 8, and you don't need me to tell you that you have to buy this. You can get it on iTunes or Amazon (though it doesn't seem to be listed yet).

They will be releasing two more discs this year as well: live recordings of the Haydn 88, 101, and 104 (coming this April, in conjunction with their performances of Haydn's Creation) and a studio recording of instrumental Vivaldi (coming next September as they open their 31st season).

Here are the details for the Hunt Lieberson disc:

Berlioz, Les Nuits d’été

Handel, “Figlio non è…L’angue offeso mai riposa” from Giulio Cesare
Handel, “Ben a raggion…Vieni, o figlio e mi consola” from Ottone
Handel, “Mirami altero in volto” from Arianna
Handel, “La giustizia ha già sull’arco” from Giulio Cesare
Handel, “Ombra cara di mia sposa” from Radamisto
Handel, “Ogni vento, che al porto lo spinga” from Agrippina
Handel, Encore: “Qual nave smarrita” from Radamisto

fun stuff I may or may not get to: December

It’s sugarplum month, but we don’t need to let that stop us. There will be Christmas-tinged items on this list, but that’s hardly avoidable, even if I wanted to. I will proceed along my usual arbitrary and personal lines (no Nutcrackers, but the Hard Nut would be listed if it was being staged this year in these parts, which it isn’t being). There will be Messiahs! I know it’s one of the ultimate holiday chestnuts, but this is the season for chestnuts, and even though I should be tired of it I’m not. In fact I’m listening to it right now. Because I probably won’t make any of the live performances, due to conflicts beyond my control.

Thursday, December 2, the Pacific Film Archive, Paramount Theatre, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival unite to present Carl Theodor Dreyer’s astounding 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, accompanied by a live performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, an oratorio inspired by the film. Information here. Go and marvel!

John Adams and El Nino return to the San Francisco Symphony December 2-4. Later in the month there’s a little more Adams and a lot more Messiah.

Philharmonia Baroque presents Messiah on December 3, 4, 5, and 7, in various locales as is their wont. And American Bach Soloists presents Messiah on December 16, 17, and 18. If the calendar or location don’t decide for you, you can compare casts and other relevant information: here for Philharmonia Baroque, here for American Bach Soloists, and here for the San Francisco Symphony.

Magnificat mixes it up by presenting Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit, which uses old French carols as its basis, along with other seasonal music. December 17-19 in various locales; details here.

Berkeley Rep revives Mary Zimmerman’s fun production of The Arabian Nights, December 11-30.

Cutting Ball Theater extends its production of The Tempest to December 19 (my thoughts here, but in case you don't want to click through, it's a recommendation). And if you want more of the Elizabethans, Cutting Ball’s Hidden Classics Reading Series (which is free), has Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, on December 5. (Opera fans may know the play as the source for Richard Strauss’s Die Schweigsame Frau, though the opera is possibly done even less often than the play. I have actually seen the play staged, but never the opera.) By the way, can anyone explain to me why there is no good (that means affordable and scholarly yet meant for the public) complete edition of Jonson’s plays and masques? He must be fuming over how his rival Shakespeare has outstripped him.

I would be at Epicoene on the 5th if I didn’t already have a ticket for Elza van den Heever’s solo recital, presented by San Francisco Performances, part of their always worthwhile Young Masters series.

And Cal Performances has a full slate, including Christian Tetzlaff playing Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin on December 4, and Nicholas Hodges on the 12th, with the Hammerklavier and Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: October

Cal Performances gets things off to a terrific start with several west coast premieres from the Mark Morris Dance Group: Socrate, Looky, and Behemoth, September 30 to October 3. Jeremy Denk appears Sunday October 24, with a wonderful program: the Ligeti Etudes, Books 1 and 2, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And from the 26th to the 30th, Benjamin Bagby is performing Beowulf (with surtitles) in what the series brochure calls Anglo-Saxon – do they not call it Old English anymore? Ah, tempus fugit. . . They have a bunch of other interesting stuff as well, but that’s what I have tickets for so far.

San Francisco Performances presents the Takacs Quartet on October 9, playing Haydn, Bartok, and Beethoven. Again: they have other interesting stuff this month, but that’s what I have a ticket for so far.

Cutting Ball Theater starts its season with a Hidden Classics Reading Series presentation of Andromache, by Euripides, on Sunday October 3 at 1:00 p.m. (The Hidden Classics series has free admission.)

Between the Lines, directed by Nicole Paiement, presents Riding the Elevator into the Sky on October 9, featuring Chiaroscuro Azzurro by Laura Schwendinger with Wei He on violin and David Conte’s Sexton Songs, with Marnie Breckenridge, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. 415-503-6275 for tickets.

Magnificat presents a rare opportunity to hear John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, 8-10 October, in a different location each night, so check out details on their website.

In further baroque developments, Philharmonia Baroque presents a variety of works by Bach, including the Wedding Cantata, the harpsichord concertos in D minor and D major, and the Orchestral Suite No. 1; October 15-19 in various locations, so check out details on their website.

The Beethoven 7 is perhaps my favorite of his symphonies, so I’m glad to see the San Francisco Symphony has it scheduled October 7-9, with some interesting accompanying pieces by Revueltas, Villa-Lobos, and Varese.

The Shotgun Players offer Mary Stuart, writer-director Mark Jackson's version of Schiller's play.

At the end of the month (starting October 22), Berkeley Rep starts its run of the three-part, twelve-playwright west coast premiere of The Great Game: Afghanistan.

And at the very end of the month, October 30 and 31, Urban Opera presents The Witch of Endor, a pasticcio version of Saul's visit to the witch of Endor (familiar from Handel's Saul, if not from The First Book of Samuel) based on music mostly by Purcell. The title role is sung by Shawnette Sulker, who was so good in Carter's A Mirror on Which to Dwell.

Orlando

It finally dawned on my American mind that in order to reduce my debt level I should maybe stop spending so much money; and though I do have quite a backlog of thoughts on things I’ve already seen, as well as of already-purchased tickets, I’d still like to thank Philharmonia Baroque for offering me a ticket to their recent performances of Handel's wonderful opera Orlando, as otherwise it would have fallen victim to my occasional frugality, and I found the performance, despite some reservations about the staging, absolutely enchanting. I was at the second performance (the first at First Congregational in Berkeley), on a cold and wet Saturday.

Three or four potted orange trees on either side of the altar/stage area, and a bench or two, were the only set, and the only one necessary. The orange trees in their pots were a visual reminder of the classic Italian Renaissance garden, and through the garden to the opera’s source material, Ariosto’s Italian Renaissance epic Orlando Furioso, and a reminder of how central the Arcadian vale is to Handel’s opera; characters frequently compare their state to their bucolic surroundings, or stand there apostrophizing the glades they should be fleeing. Madness and sorrow are central to the plot (Orlando loves Angelica; Angelica loves Medoro, which drives Orlando crazy) but there’s still something so fresh and clean and springlike about the music; it’s the madness and sorrow of young love, so intense until suddenly it’s not. The orchestra was phenomenal, unflagging throughout the opera’s three-and-a-half hours. And a friend pointed out to me that the singers had their backs to the orchestra and to Nicholas McGegan conducting from the harpsichord, yet I didn’t sense any coordination problems.

The odd acoustic of First Congregational is I think less of a problem for higher voices, making it well suited to the stratospheric antics of the baroque, but bass-baritone Wolf Matthias Friedrich as the magician Zoroastro, who has the only really low voice in the cast, had a strange hollow sound in the first act, though he made some vocal adjustments so that the problem disappeared in Acts 2 and 3. I’ve noticed before that singers at First Congo concerts will adjust their vocalizing partway through. As the shepherdess Dorinda, who loves Medoro but discovers he does not love her, Susanne Ryden was very pretty, both in person and voice, but was allowed to mug to a distracting extent. I’ve noticed this before at Philharmonia Baroque performances – someone over there needs to tell the performers to tone it down and keep it natural.

Ryden was at her best in the opening of Act 2, when she has a sad aria about seeing her beloved Medoro personified in the surrounding streams and flowers. Sadness encouraged simplicity. (By the way, there were no surtitles, but the house lights were high enough so we could follow along in the printed libretto, in authentic eighteenth-century style, and in the authentic eighteenth-century translation by Samuel Humphreys.) There were others spots, like the trio ending Act 1, when Angelica and Medoro try to comfort Dorinda, that were played for crude physical laughs rather than for tenderness and some sort of emotional truth. I find this approach puzzling – if you don’t see anything in baroque opera but pretty tunes and slapstick, why would you bother going to all the trouble of reviving them?

I was fortunate that one of the first operas I saw was the Peter Sellars production of Orlando at ART, the one set at Cape Canaveral on the grounds that space travel was the modern equivalent of the magical stage machinery of the baroque (and indeed in Ariosto's epic there is a trip to the moon involved in restoring Orlando’s sanity). Sellars’s productions are often described by their most superficial aspects, but at least back in that early stage of his career there was an emphasis on the emotional truth of the characters and on re-thinking who they were and what they did – in other words, he took the works at their word, and seriously. I preferred his dreamier, more poetic Dorinda; there wasn’t anything exactly wrong with the conception here, which put the shepherdess in the long line of those pert and knowing servant girls whose coy and shallow flirtations contrast with the tragic depths of our upper-class protagonists; I just think Dorinda deserved a little more dignity.

As for the rest of the cast – William Towers as Orlando, Dominique Labelle as Angelica, and Diana Moore as Medora – I had no reservations about them; they were magnificent throughout. Labelle’s rich and beautiful soprano is well-known to Philharmonia Baroque audiences, and was displayed to fine effect here. The other two were new to me. Towers is a tall, angular countertenor whose gleaming voice was perfect for the hero, and he did a brilliant job in vocally delineating Orlando’s increasing frenzy and fury until the explosion of his mad scene. Medoro can easily be a lightweight, something like Paris in the Greek legends: a youthful prince, he lacks the heroism of Orlando, and as a lover he's also less than noble, since he initially deceives Dorinda, and is fairly passive in his relationship with Angelica. But Diana Moore made the case for him about as well as it can be made, through the authority of sheer vocal beauty. At moments I was reminded of the sound of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. I’d love to hear more of her. I hope this is one of the performances that Philharmonia Baroque has recorded for release – with the sometimes unfortunate staging no longer visible, this performance would provide straight-through musical pleasure.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: April

April 8, 10, 11, and 13, Nicholas McGegan leads Philharmonia Baroque in Handel’s great opera, Orlando (one of the first operas I ever saw!).

Berkeley Opera offers Copland’s The Tender Land on April 10, 16, and 18.

As always San Francisco Performances has a lot of exciting stuff going on: On April 2, Alice Coote, recently announced as the replacement Charlotte in San Francisco Opera’s upcoming Werther, gives a recital. I was looking forward to hearing Garanca, whom I’ve never heard, but frankly I think Coote, whom I have heard, is going to give the audience a more interesting evening. On April 6, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Lera Auerbach perform Shostokovich’s 24 Preludes for Piano (arranged for cello and piano by Auerbach) and Auerbach’s own 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano. The brilliant young pianist Yuja Wang gives a recital on April 22 featuring Schumann, Schubert, and Prokofiev. Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson read and perform from The Rest Is Noise on Saturday morning, April 24, and Yevgeny Sudbin performs Chopin, Stevenson, Liszt, and Ravel on April 25.

The Aurora Theater offers a rare chance to see Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. I’m already thrilled with this one – not only did my Tuesday night ticket cost me less than $40, but the play starts at the more rational weekday hour of 7:00, and not the standard 8:00. It can be a little tricky to call the box office, which has limited hours, but it’s worth it because the Aurora’s on-line system uses that horrible “best seat” system. I’ve decided I’ll only buy tickets on-line if the system shows me exactly which seats are available. I’ll decide which is the best seat available, thank you.

April 23-25 Magnificat performs Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine (in a different location each day).

At the San Francisco Symphony, Edwin Outwater leads an interesting program April 7-11, featuring music from Whisper House, a new composition by Duncan Shiek (of Spring Awakening, which I haven’t seen or heard). Shiek’s piece replaces the previously announced Five Shakespeare Sonnets by Rufus Wainwright, which will allegedly happen next season. The program also offers Zipangu by Claude Vivier (I’ve heard a lot about the late composer and am very eager to hear this) as well as Gounod’s ballet music from Faust and Poulenc’s Suite from Les Biches. The wonderful Symphony Chorus gives its annual concert on Sunday April 11. On April 15-16 the symphony accompanies Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Gold Rush. Me, I’d happily stay at home and watch the DVD, but if you don’t have the DVD and a big screen TV and can stand to watch movies in a crowd, then go and have a wonderful time. This is probably my favorite Chaplin film, though my favorite Chaplin moment remains the last scene in City Lights, which I can’t even describe because I break down and sob helplessly. Since the symphony is accompanying the film, I assume this is the original 1925 silent version, and not the inferior version Chaplin released in 1942 with some cuts and his overly fey narration replacing the intertitles. April 29-May 1, Christoph Eschenbach conducts Schumann’s Fourth and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, with wonderful soloists in Christine Schafer and Matthias Goerne, and that brings us into May.

and Troy once more expire

So there I was Thursday before last, on my way to Philharmonia Baroque’s Purcell program at Herbst Theater, crossing a one-way street with the light, feeling secure that the cars would only come on one side, when a monstro car made an insane and completely illegal turn from Van Ness head on in the wrong direction to this one-way street, nearly hitting me as well as smashing into the cars stopped at the light. This complete moron just wanted to make a U-turn, and couldn’t possibly go up a block to a street where that would have been possible. And then she flipped me off! Yes, I had flipped her off first, but that’s only the natural order of things when a ton of steel bears down on your defenseless person when you have the right of way. The very least this idiotic (insert your favorite derogatory term here) could have done is pretend to feel some shame. I only wish I could have reached out to her with some heart-piercing empathetic words, or possibly just a baseball bat. Honestly, what has become of the simple decency of pretending to care about other people? It’s a world turned upside down, indeed it is.

And I’m not fully convinced the two next to me in the theater, hacking, chatting, and program-flipping during the first half of the concert, actually were people. The woman’s scrawny form, large empty black eyes, and bulbous forehead narrowing down to her clacking mandibles made me think she was just some giant ant transmogrified through some terrible accident, possibly involving gamma rays or suchlike, the same accident which had plucked her male companion, a snuffling old badger, from his woodland dell, and mysteriously deposited them in a concert hall for an evening of Henry Purcell. No wonder they didn’t know how to behave in such a startlingly alien environment! You see, after being nearly killed by Idiot of the Evening #1 and then finding myself seated as always next to some more Idiots of the Evening, I have decided to approach the universe with compassion and understanding, because seriously what other choice do I have?

So the concert started, and given the evening so far, and the general tenor of my days, and the known difficulty of getting, say, five people to show up in the same meeting room at the same time, it struck me that here we had roughly fifty people all come together, some to sing and some to play various instruments and all in harmonious coordination, working together and attending to each other, in an effort to bring beauty and joy to a blighted world and to let a dead artist’s works not die with him, and what a strange and wonderful thing this is. And I see it all the time, and experience it on recordings, and I’ve grown blasé about it, and I shouldn’t be.

Moments of disoriented epiphany aside, the first half of the concert, though deeply enjoyable, was also very odd, sort of a Purcell grab-bag. The concert was billed as “The Passion of Dido,” in realistic acknowledgement that we were all there to hear Susan Graham as the tragic Queen of Carthage, but it was really a surprise birthday party for the composer’s 350th. So we skipped from sacred to profane and back again, as no doubt did Purcell's comissions, first hearing a chorus (O Sing Unto the Lord a New Song) followed by the Chacony in G minor followed by another chorus (Hear My Prayer, O Lord) and then the Suite of incidental music from Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer (anyone want to join me in clamoring for a revival? . . . well, fine, forget I mentioned it!), the Rondeau of which jumped out at me with not-quite-placeable familiarity until the program-book came to my aide-memoire by mentioning that Britten used it as the theme for his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, a gift from one native-born British composer to the next.

To top off the suite, Celine Ricci sang Lucinda is bewitching fair, and I must say that however bewitching Lucinda may be, Ricci did not have the same effect on me, though I can’t quite say if I simply didn’t care for her very bright voice or if her non-stop cartoony mugging just put me off too much. She’ll improve immeasurable as a performer, I think, when she learns the value of standing still. I might be surrounded by gargoyles in the street or the audience but, having higher standards for the theater, I like people on stage to resemble my fantasy of human beings.

After the intermission, having had more than enough of my neighbors, as soon as the lights dimmed and the main event was about to start I slipped a few rows forward to one of the few empty seats where I could be blissfully surrounded by people actually paying attention. And here I’ve made you wait almost as long for the appearance of Susan Graham as we waited that night! I had been a bit let down by her rendition of the Ruckert Lieder at the Symphony in September, but she was triumphant and heart-breaking as Dido, and in full blonde glamazon mode to boot, dressed in a sort of purple-and-coppery beaded sheath, towering physically over everyone on stage, even her Aeneas (William Berger, and though I thought he started out a bit weak, he soon was supple and powerful enough to make a vivid impression in his small but crucial role). Graham astutely played against her strength by emphasizing Dido’s pain in sometimes unexpected places; lines such as “For ‘tis enough, whate’er you now decree, / That you had once a thought of leaving me”, which might have blazoned forth with offended majesty, were instead a tender reminder of the little interior bit of human dignity we try to cling to in ourselves.

Brian Thorsett was Mercury and the saucy Cockney sailor; Jill Grove was elegantly malevolent as the Sorceress. Her two assistant witches were Cyndia Sieden (who also sang Belinda) and Celine Ricci (who also sang the Second Woman); I much preferred Sieden, since Ricci had not spent the intermission taking my telepathic advice and calming down her gesticulating. There seems to be a growing tradition of having the Sorceress express elaborate boredom as her accomplices roulade away on ho ho ho; I’m not sure where this comes from (maybe Mark Morris’s staging?) and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s mildly funny, but the joke is at the expense of the repetition and virtuosic display so characteristic of baroque music, so the effect is of a subtle insinuation that the art form we’ve gathered to hear is basically strange and laughable. Would these people have the same reaction to a modern form like so-called minimalism, a form also dependent on repetition and virtuosity? An early music ensemble should be able to shake off the underlying nineteenth-century mindset.

in the room the women come and go

At the end of April I had one of those over-planned weeks, with night after night of concerts, and I ended up with a cold that was getting worse as the week passed – initially I thought I might be having just another bad allergy attack, since it was that time of year, but eventually signs so subtle I can’t quite tell you what they are convinced me that it was a cold.

So I sympathized with Magdalena Kozena, who gamely came out to sing to us despite her obvious sickness – her eyes looked exhausted. She has a really interesting face in a way that goes beyond just being a beautiful woman, though she is; I kept thinking that if she had been around in the 1920s Dreyer or Murnau would have featured her in a film. Her husband, Sir Simon Rattle, was in attendance and being quite gracious and genial, from what I could see, which I'm afraid is about as gossipy as I'm going to get. Despite my disappointment that I was not hearing her in her best voice (and she seemed disappointed that she couldn’t give the audience her best), I enjoyed this recital more than some others I’ve attended where the singer was in better voice.

For the first half she sang a Purcell selection and then Schumann’s Frauenliebe und –leben, but for the second half she sang only the Duparc songs, since she felt that her cold wouldn’t let her do justice to Berg’s Seven Early Songs. So that makes twice this season I’ve missed them, since I couldn’t get to the performance at the Symphony a few weeks later. So it was an early evening, and I hope Kozena had a speedy recovery.

A couple of days later I was back at Herbst for Stephanie Blythe and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for a program called “American Voices.” Usually I read the program notes ahead of time but this time I hadn’t, so as I listened to the first piece, a Trio in D minor by John Antes, I vacillated between being impressed at the fluid and enjoyable music and puzzled that what I had assumed was a contemporary composer could mimic the sound-period of Haydn and Mozart so effectively. It takes real skill to write like that, but it’s an odd act of ventriloquism for a 21st-century American. It turns out that Antes sounds like a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart because he was, which strengthened me in my usual resolve to read the program notes while waiting for the concert to start, instead of doing whatever it was I was doing that night, which was probably staring vacuously around hoping I didn't have a sneezing fit during the performance.

Next came the big event of the program, the Bay Area premiere of Vignettes: Covered Wagon Woman, featuring Blythe in excerpts from the journal Margaret Ann Alsip Frink kept in 1850 as she crossed the plains, set to music by Alan Louis Smith. Blythe sang beautifully in clear tones (she had asked that the words not be available until the intermission, which struck some as arrogant; I thought it was a good way to make the audience pay attention to her and not their programs). The music was enjoyable, though I knew immediately which section was going to be about the Indians and which about the buffalo and so forth, and indeed I knew there would be Indians and buffalo, and suitably the most inspired music was for her dream on a mountaintop.

Frink was a plucky, can-do woman, and though there are a few scornful remarks quoted about bringing a woman across the plains you know she’s tough enough to handle it and them; and . . . and I am just not worthy of these pioneer women, so strong, so sensible, so filled with gumption and quiet strength and steady resolve; and there I was, falling to pieces because of a bad cold, surely the sort of ailment that Frink would not even notice as she simultaneously quilted, put up preserves, and built a sodhouse against the coming winter.

I was reminded of how beautifully Willa Cather handles this sort of thing – just when I’m about to crack under the pressure of simple strength and homespun values and human decency and drop the book in favor of anything in which people take too much opium, she darkens the portrait with a farmer who shoots himself in the heart one late winter day or a drifter who throws himself into the combine or some other reminder of the exacting toll of the pioneer life. I wish Smith had darkened his portrait of Frink.

After the intermission we had Gershwin’s gentle and lovely Lullaby for String Quartet, followed by Amy Beach’s Quintet in F-sharp minor for Piano and Strings, Opus 67, which Lisa hated and referred to as Tchaikovsky lite. I’m not going to mount a spirited (or much of any other kind of) defense of the work, but I will say I found it pleasant enough, and if you’re going to wish that these fine performers had instead given us one of the acknowledged masterpieces, then you end up with the repertory of ten pieces that is choking so much concert-going, since acknowledged masterpieces just aren't that easy to write. So if they want to play Beach, sure, I’ll give her a listen, even if I'm not necessarily going back for seconds.

The night after that I was at Philharmonia Baroque’s performance of Handel’s Athalia, and let me thank them for starting at the sensible hour of 7:30 since I was exhausted from crossing the prairies the night before, plus of course the debilitating effects of all that cold medicine. I enjoyed the performance, particularly after the couple next to me left at intermission – I don’t know what they thought a performance of Athalia was going to entail, but they were clearly bored and increasingly noisy about it – and if the evening didn’t really catch fire for me, I think I need to lay some of the blame with Mr Handel.

He is one of my musical godfathers and I love the oratorios, but I have to admit that the characterization of the title character is a little underheated, and I don’t think this is one of those cases in which we can’t hear 18th-century rage because we expect 20th-century noise and confusion – he re-used a lot of the music in Parnasso in Festa, a celebratory serenata written for Princess Anne’s marriage to Prince William of Orange, which indicates a surprising degree of flexibility in music written for the story of a wicked queen who tries to kill the child heir to the throne – incidentally, during intermission I overheard several members of the audience who seemed puzzled about the story, which is basically pretty simple; surely it is not possible that our audiences are not immersed in the Sacred Scriptures?

The cast was solid. Dominique Labelle sang the lead and Marnie Breckenridge, always a pleasure to hear, was in the equally prominent role of Josabeth. Celine Ricci as the youthful Joas sang well but should not have been allowed to thumb her nose at the thwarted Athaliah, such hijinks being unsuitable for a child raised in the Temple.

And then the night after that I was at Berkeley hearing Dianne Reeves. I had never heard her before, live or on CD, and wasn’t sure quite what to expect. She looks so elegant in all of her photos that I was expecting someone a little more ethereal. She’s very down-to-earth, has a beautiful voice in the Sarah Vaughn style, and expertly told some funny stories (though sometimes, as in the one about getting in trouble for trying to add her particular flare to her high-school performance of Bach’s Magnificat, I had to overlook the subtext, which is that classical music is restrained and someone else’s style and only jazz allows you to express yourself). The etiquette is always a little different at jazz concerts; years ago I heard Sarah Vaughn herself in concert and one woman in the audience formed her own Amen Corner, leaving white boy here in the awkward position of wondering if it’s inappropriate/racist to want people to shut up and listen. So this time I had the Three Sisters behind me going “mmmmmm-hmm”, but they weren’t too bad and I was drugged up on cold medicine anyway yet still enjoyed hearing a singer new to me. And then the week was over and so to bed.