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SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL
FESTIVAL
REPORT
Acis and Galatea:
Boston Early Music Festival and Pacific MusicWorks:
BEMF Chamber Ensemble
Musical directors: Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs
Stage director: Gilbert Blin
Costumes: Anna Watkins
Cast:
Acis: Aaron Sheehan
Galatea: Teresa Wakim
Damon: Jason McStoots
Coridon: Zachary Wilder
Polyphemus: Douglas Williams
Esther:
Orchestra of Pacific MusicWorks
The Tudor Choir (Doug Fullington, director)
Musical director: Stephen Stubbs
Cast:
Esther: Shannon Mercer
Assuerus: Ross Hauck
Haman: Charles Robert Stephens
Mordecai, Habdonah, First Israelite: Zachary Wilder
Israelite Priest: Matthew White
Israelite Boy: Catherine Webster
Persian Officer, Second Israelite: Thomas Thompson
Orchestral and chamber works:
Seattle Baroque Orchestra
Musical director, conductor, and violin soloist: Ingrid Matthews
Artistic director and harpsichord soloist: Byron
Schenkman
The final weekend of the American Handel Festival,
which explored the composer's output to the tune of
some 30 concerts over the past two weeks, offered
performances of Acis and Galatea and
Esther. This was a clever pairing. It was these
two works - the first labeled "A pastoral
entertainment," the second "An oratorio" - that
essentially marked the turning-point for Handel, away
from his German roots and partly Italian training
toward a new career that saw him feted as an
essentially English composer.
It's true that his London seasons as composer and
impresario were centered for the next two decades on
opera in Italian. But Acis and Esther,
composed in 1718 at the future Duke of Chandos's
estate of Cannons near London, were both set to
English texts, and carried within them the seeds of
the monumental series of English oratorios that was to
occupy him through his final years after the
production of opera had become commercially
unsustainable.
The festival's Acis and Galatea came to
Seattle by courtesy of the celebrated Boston Early
Music Festival, whose local debut this was.
Co-directed musically by BEMF's Paul O'Dette and
Seattle's own Stephen Stubbs, it was one of those
"play within a play" productions, semi-staged, with
handsome costumes by Anna Watkins but without scenery.
Stage director Gilbert Blin conceived it as an
imaginary rehearsal for a performance at Cannons.
What we saw on the Town Hall stage was a rather
Pirandello-esque spectacle - the five characters of
this Arcadian love-story in search of a composer. The
principals took their turns on center-stage, and then
moved off to the side to enjoy what my English
compatriots still call "a nice cup of tea" while
someone else took over the vocal thread. It was
somewhat reminiscent of the way Peter Kazaras, in his
recent Seattle Opera production of Falstaff,
broke down the conventional distinction between the
actor-singers as human beings and the action on stage.
And the spectacle of a group of aristocrats playing at
being shepherds was rather like the effect of highly
sophisticated and elegantly dressed persons at charity
balls trying to match the primitivism of contemporary
popular dance.
Movement was largely stylized. Blin drew from his
actor-singers a vocabulary of gesture faithful to the
pre-Romantic tradition, with the performer aiming not
to embody, as it were, but to represent in a more
dispassionate way the emotions of the character in
question. This made it easier for the persons of the
story - the shepherds Acis, Damon, and Coridon, the
sea-nymph Galatea, and the Cyclops Polyphemus - to
shift when necessary out of character and become
simply the tenors, soprano, and bass of the ensembles
that frame the plot.
Once or twice there was a danger of distraction, when
someone was gesturing upstage while another of the
principals was singing, but for the most part the
conception worked beautifully. And musically the
performance was an unalloyed delight. Aaron Sheehan
and Teresa Wakim in the title roles made a splendid
pair of lovers; the two other shepherds' parts were
finely touched in by Jason McStoots and Zachary
Wilder; and the Polyphemus, Douglas Williams, was a
formidable stage presence. It was perhaps due to the
exceptional firmness of the foundation his beautifully
produced bass laid for the harmony that the texture of
the ensembles - not to mention the words - sounded
more lucid than in any of the Aces and Galateae
I have heard over the years. The BEMF Chamber
Ensemble, too, played superbly, with some spectacular
tootling on the sopranino recorder by Kathryn Montoya
over Williams's bucolic "O ruddier than the cherry."
The program booklet for this performance was unusually
detailed and informative. It was all the more
surprising, then, that no mention was made of the
Italian version of the story, Aci, Galatea e
Polifemo, that Handel had composed ten years
earlier.
The following evening's performance of Esther
in St. James Cathedral under Stephen Stubbs's
direction attained a similar level of excellence, with
clean singing and playing by Doug Fullington's Tudor
Choir and the Orchestra of Pacific MusicWorks, and
with impressive soloists including Sharon Mercer in
the title role and the indefatigable Ross Hauck as
Assuerus. Charles Robert Stephens was suitably
formidable as the unsavory Haman, and Zachary Wilder,
Matthew White, Catherine Webster, and Thomas Thompson
filled the roles of a variety of Israelites capably.
The work itself does not quite match the charm of
Acis, but its compelling rendering of the human
drama in this regrettably still relevant tale of
historical anti-Semitism is prophetic of much in the
later Handel's greatest oratorios and operas.
Handel had a genius for ending substantial works with
a light touch, so it was perhaps appropriate that the
festival's last offering was a relatively lightweight
concert in Town Hall on Sunday afternoon by Ingrid
Matthews's splendid Seattle Baroque Orchestra. It
seemed almost perverse to bill the program as
"Handel's Grand Concertos" and then not to include
anything from the supreme Opus 6 set, but the
concertos and sonatas we did hear were expertly and
often beautifully done.
Two sonatas for, respectively, one and two violins
brought incisive playing from Ms. Matthews and Tekla
Cunningham, backed by harpsichordist and cellist Byron
Schenkman and Nathan Whittaker's stylish continuo. The
second and third concertos from Opus 4 were less
convincing: certainly instrumentation in the 18th
century was far from being set in stone, but to play
what are clearly solo organ parts on a rather
flimsy-sounding harpsichord was not a very satisfying
idea. Harpsichords built from Zuckermann kits work
well enough in a domestic context, but perhaps it's
time for some wealthy philanthropist to treat the
Seattle Baroque Orchestra to a more luxurious
instrument.
Grateful thanks are due to musicologist and
broadcaster Marty Ronish for bringing the American
Handel Festival for the first time to Seattle. The
only trouble is to work out what we devotees are to do
with ourselves in the Handel-less weeks to come.
Bernard Jacobson
A shorter version of this review appeared in the
Seattle Times.