Though Handel’s oratorio Theodora - as two recent productions, at Glyndebourne and the Salzburg Festival, have advantageously demonstrated - can be transformed successfully into an opera, it still works best in its original non-theatrical guise. One of his last and greatest masterpieces, it has long been neglected in comparison with Messiah, but this week in Edinburgh and Glasgow the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with Harry Bicket as its alert and stylish conductor, brought sharp focus to its musical beauty and steadily developing tragic dimension.
In Edinburgh the Queen’s Hall, a converted eighteenth-century church, was its atmospherically intimate setting. With the orchestra and soloists at floor level, and only the SCO Chorus on the reduced platform, its effect was direct and greatly moving. Its story, that of a Christian martyr, cared for and protected by a sympathetic Roman soldier in occupied Syria, rang startlingly true even when presented, without action, in oratorio format. By ridding the music of the plink-plonk cadences which traditionally terminate so many sections of the score, Bicket proceeded straight into the action - though the decision to bring the soloists forward and back from side positions, their footsteps often loudly audible on the stone floor, was less of a blessing.
The performance was nevertheless a quietly searing experience, eloquently voiced by Stefanie True and Iestyn Davies as heroine and counter-tenor hero, and Neal Davies as the hectoring Roman commander who torments them. Rosana Pokupic began somewhat plummily as Theodora’s mezzo-soprano ally, but her voice cleared, and Samuel Boden was a nimble, graceful tenor. The SCO Chorus, a model of total stillness and expressiveness, was an asset to the long evening.
The Glyndebourne and Salzburg Festival productions, resourceful, artful operatic updatings of the story, are both available on DVD. The Glyndebourne version, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by the erudite William Christie, has Dawn Upshaw and the late lamented Loraine Hunt Lieberson in the women’s roles and the robust David Daniels as the heroic counter-tenor, though Peter Sellars’s otherwise fascinating production, with a presidential Roman villain, is marred by his constant reliance on semaphoric hand signals.
Christof Loy's more recent Salzburg production, which is my personal preference, transforms the Festspielhaus into a vast reception room, with an array of organ pipes in the background, is admirably conducted by Ivor Bolton, a former music director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with the pure-toned Christine Schafer in the title role, the striking counter-tenor Behun Mehta and Bernard Fink as her allies, and Johannes Martin Kranzle as a lascivious villain.
24 October 2015
In Edinburgh the Queen’s Hall, a converted eighteenth-century church, was its atmospherically intimate setting. With the orchestra and soloists at floor level, and only the SCO Chorus on the reduced platform, its effect was direct and greatly moving. Its story, that of a Christian martyr, cared for and protected by a sympathetic Roman soldier in occupied Syria, rang startlingly true even when presented, without action, in oratorio format. By ridding the music of the plink-plonk cadences which traditionally terminate so many sections of the score, Bicket proceeded straight into the action - though the decision to bring the soloists forward and back from side positions, their footsteps often loudly audible on the stone floor, was less of a blessing.
The performance was nevertheless a quietly searing experience, eloquently voiced by Stefanie True and Iestyn Davies as heroine and counter-tenor hero, and Neal Davies as the hectoring Roman commander who torments them. Rosana Pokupic began somewhat plummily as Theodora’s mezzo-soprano ally, but her voice cleared, and Samuel Boden was a nimble, graceful tenor. The SCO Chorus, a model of total stillness and expressiveness, was an asset to the long evening.
The Glyndebourne and Salzburg Festival productions, resourceful, artful operatic updatings of the story, are both available on DVD. The Glyndebourne version, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by the erudite William Christie, has Dawn Upshaw and the late lamented Loraine Hunt Lieberson in the women’s roles and the robust David Daniels as the heroic counter-tenor, though Peter Sellars’s otherwise fascinating production, with a presidential Roman villain, is marred by his constant reliance on semaphoric hand signals.
Christof Loy's more recent Salzburg production, which is my personal preference, transforms the Festspielhaus into a vast reception room, with an array of organ pipes in the background, is admirably conducted by Ivor Bolton, a former music director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with the pure-toned Christine Schafer in the title role, the striking counter-tenor Behun Mehta and Bernard Fink as her allies, and Johannes Martin Kranzle as a lascivious villain.
24 October 2015
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