Theodora from the Salzburg Festival

And what’s this? At the start of a two-disc DVD, it could be anyone’s guess. A crowd of people are enthusiastically  assembling for what looks like a lively business conference, with a cocktail party in the offing. The men are in dinner jackets, the women in black dresses. Behind them, a vast array of organ pipes stretches across the breadth of the Salzburg Festspielhaus’s huge cinemascopic stage, where Herbert von Karajan once conducted The Ring.

The crowd of people are, in fact, mostly members of the admirable young Salzburg Bach Choir, laced with some top-quality stars, under the stylish conductorship of Ivor Bolton, who for a time was in charge of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Here, with the substantial Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, he continues to prove his worth.

Representing what in Handel’s time would be the forces of evil, the randy, predatory chief executive officer of the business organisation - if that is what it is -  is making a boorish nuisance of himself to the only woman dressed in white, who is today’s personification, we can assume, of the heroine of Handel’s tragic oratorio about Christian martyrdom a long time ago. She brushes him off but he will be back.

Christof Loy’s recent theatrical reinvention of Handel’s great, late masterpiece as a modern opera seria grows gradually underway. Clearly it is Salzburg’s answer to Peter Sellars’s famous Glyndebourne production of the same work, and is a fascinating response not only to Handel but to Sellars at Glyndebourne. Even if you already possess the Glyndebourne DVD, do not resist the temptation to buy the newer one. Each in its own way makes an impressive case for updating the story from Roman antiquity to the present time, while remaining true to the musical eloquence of the original.

Theodora is sung with touching purity, even when her dress is colour-coded from white to scarlet,  by Christine Schaefer, who once sang Berg’s Lulu, a role much less pure, at Glyndebourne - another DVD well worth acquiring -  and who is a famed exponent of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.  The counter tenor Bejun Mehta is ardent as her lover, the secret Christian who faces death with her at the end, and Joseph Kaiser is the fine tenor who sympathises with their plight.

Another tenor, Ryland Davies, the star of some early Scottish Opera productions, plays the small Handelian role of the Messenger.  The sublime Bernarda Fink is Theodora’s devoted supporter (at Glyndebourne it was the lovingly remembered Lorraine Hunt Lieberson)  and Johannes Martin Kranzle portrays  the brutally convivial CEO with ample verve.

Such intelligent updating  brings a gripping new look to the plot, just as it did at Glyndebourne. Thus staged, Handelian drama breathes  afresh.
2 June 2015