This concert marked the opening
of the 19th Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music, this year’s
theme being ‘Between Intimacy and Splendour,’ and you could hardly hope
for an evening which might better exemplify both qualities: St. John’s
is the epitome of baroque splendour in terms of surroundings yet its
atmosphere and acoustic are famously intimate, the ‘English Concert’
has always made it a priority to foster familiarity with its audiences
in terms of performance practice and attitude, and finally Handel’s
work, written when he was just 23, is the perfect blend of dramatic
splendour and showiness with tender intimacy. No one could advocate
the status of a ‘Messiah’ for ‘Resurrezione,’ but given the commitment
of a musical director who clearly adores it, and a team of soloists
who sang it as though there could be no argument about its greatness,
it was hard not to wonder why one so rarely hears it.
Opera having been banned from
Rome by papal edict some 30 years before Handel came to the city, a
tradition of lavish presentations of oratorio had unsurprisingly grown
up, and when Handel was commissioned to compose an Easter Sunday Oratorio
for 1708, he was given positively luxurious conditions to facilitate
the work, including the then rarity of three whole rehearsals as well
as a vastly complex setting with a sumptuous, candelabra-and-cherub
theme and a huge painted backdrop. The narrative to be presented in
these surroundings was of course of the highest spiritual import, but
in keeping with the operatic nature of oratorio at the time, the characters
are not so much vocal soloists as protagonists in a drama, enacting
rather than reporting on the events of Easter Sunday.
The first part depicts the argument
between Heaven and Hell, or Good and Evil, in the forms of an Angel
and Lucifer, with the serene confidence of the Angel being contrasted
with the almost comical blustering of the Fiend. As Blake said, referring
to ‘Paradise Lost,’ ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote
of Angels and God, and at Liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because
he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ Rebellion
and passion are of course more likely to engage than mere confidence,
and Handel’s music for Lucifer does everything to promote those qualities,
especially in the dramatic sweep of the range required, and Alan Ewing
did his best to present a swaggering, self-absorbed character: he was
dramatically successful but his voice, though intrinsically a fine Handelian
basso, is somewhat muffled in character and lacking in bite at crucial
moments.
Carolyn Sampson was ideally cast
as the Angel, her tone inherently pure and her technique immaculate
despite a rather muted beginning when she did not quite make all her
words tell. She sang the lovely air ‘D’amor fù consiglio’ with
elegant phrasing and sense of line, and her triumphant scene at the
close of the first part, ‘Uscite pur, uscite’ was done with great commitment,
the pure Angel now becoming a genuinely fiery presence. I was less impressed
with the other soprano, Veronica Cangemi, who sang the part of Mary
Magdalene. As with Alan Ewing, there was no doubt as to her dramatic
flair and assurance – she threw herself into the part, at times almost
too much so, and made every conflict extremely colourful, but her voice
is not quite as vibrant as her personality. Her finest moment was the
lovely lament ‘Notte, notte funesta’ which was sung with great fervour
as well as delicacy, and she was exceptionally vivid in recitative.
Recitative was also the strong
point of the mezzo-soprano Emma Curtis, whose Mary Cleophas was distinguished
by her lovely, burnished tone and serene manner: she avowed her readiness
to follow Mary Magdalene at ‘Pronta a seguirti’ with such passion that
I was a little disappointed by the following aria, but she was still
a discovery for me, genuine mezzos with a truly balanced middle register
and a secure low range being far thinner on the ground than one might
imagine, and she was a treasure in the ensembles.
Handel wrote some of his most
beautiful but also most exposed music for the tenor part of St. John,
superbly taken here by John Mark Ainsley who has few, if any equals
in this repertoire. In the Evangelist’s two arias in Part One, the first
as Felix Warnock says ‘thrillingly virtuoso’ and the second full of
sweetness, Ainsley achieved that rare feat of combining perfect control
in very ornate passages with beauty of tone and tenderness of expression,
and as for his diction, anyone hearing him for the first time would
surely find it hard to believe that his first language is English and
not Italian. In Part Two, ‘Ecco il sol’ was sung with great attention
to detail – ‘Smalta i prati, i colli indora’ actually suggesting the
movement of the sun across the landscape, and ‘Caro Figlio’ not only
confidently articulated but beautifully tender without recourse to sentimentality,
and when sung like this bringing to mind the much later but emotionally
similar ‘Waft Her, Angels’ from ‘Jephtha.’
Confident articulation and tenderness
were also very much in evidence in the orchestra, despite a rocky beginning
occasioned by some intrusive noise (an aside, but St. John’s is one
of the worst London venues for this, with much rattling, rustling and
St. Vitus dance-like behaviour from the audience – frustrated, perhaps,
by their inability to get any coffee after dinner, the requirement being
that one queues up once for one’s meal, then queues again for interval
drinks, then again for coffee) which left a couple of instruments slightly
shaky for a while. Pinnock and the English Concert present the music
with real spirit, whether in tutti or in the many passages where individuals
echo or support the voices, the lovely solo flute in ‘Così la
tortorella’ being a prime example, and the trumpets (Mark Bennett and
Michael Harrison) giving their all at those characteristically Handelian
blazes of sound.
This auspicious beginning to the
Lufthansa Festival was rapturously received by a near-capacity audience,
and one can only delight in programming like this, which introduces
so many people to great works which have yet to be a part of everyone’s
musical life: particularly enticing future concerts in the Festival
include a performance of ‘L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato’ by
the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under Ivor Bolton on June 19th,
and an evening of Purcell and Bach in Westminster Abbey with Emma Kirkby
among the soloists – warmly recommended.
Melanie Eskenazi
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