|
Back
Mostly Handel London
Barbican
07/10/2003 -
George Frideric Handel: Alexander's Feast
Gillian Keith (soprano), Mark Padmore (tenor), Stephan Loges (baritone)
Jane Glover (conductor)
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
The Barbican's second Mostly Mozart summer festival follows closely the model of its Lincoln Center namesake: Mozart symphonies, concertos and arias with middle-to-big name soloists, plus a sprinkling of Haydn and early romantic composers. It is a well-bred pops season, more or less, as you might expect from the sponsorship of Classic FM. The Barbican might be the one venue that is drearier than the Lincoln Center, and it is certainly more remote from everything else that goes on in the city it is in. But it has more diverse facilities, and can also include movies, chamber music in the foyer and a couple of concert operas, though the programme rarely swerves from the middle-middlebrow.
The opening concert took place on an evening that was hot and humid enough for Manhattan in August, but it seemed to diverge somewhat from the formula: Mozart's arrangement of Handel's Alexander's Feast is obscure Handel and very minor, atypical Mozart. Handel's Nachleben in German music, although rich, is still almost entirely a matter for scholars. The rather turgid programme notes failed to mention the one fact that might have rung a bell with the target audience, that Mozart's arrangement was commissioned by Gottfried van Swieten, who also persuaded Haydn to write The Creation. And Jane Glover's brief introduction repeated the dutiful detail about changes to the orchestration to suit classical taste without providing much of a clue as to what the work is about. Dryden's genius was acknowledged, but not the substantial content of his poem -- an account of the power of the bard Timotheus to move Alexander the Great, and the even greater power of St Cecilia's Christian music -- or of Handel's treatment of it, rich with echoes of his own role as the national composer of conquering Britain. There was more than a hint of "this is good for you" about it all, and nothing to point to the pleasure or emotional force of the work.
The performance itself was polished but generally short on excitement. The modern instruments of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as much as Mozart's plump orchestration, smoothed out the rhetoric and bravura of Handel's survey of the Greek modes and their affects, and further dulled the Anglican uplift of the final praise of St Cecilia. What was left was a one-after-the other sequence of arias. Of the singers, whose music Mozart didn't touch, only Mark Padmore, with the more cerebral narrative sections, made much impact, retaining Handelian energy and incisiveness. Gillian Keith, describing and emulating Alexander's beloved Thais in the erotically charged sections, was charming but bland. Stephan Loges as the monster from the id of the work looked suitably florid for his drinking song but lacked incisiveness in Timotheus' cries for revenge in spite of an impressively hefty lower register.
The Sixteen, all twenty six of them, got the short straw with the choruses, whose spare counterpoint scales up uncomfortably and sits strangely with the enriched orchestra.
The harp and organ concertos were missing, which meant that the concert ended while it was still almost completely light and too early for the promised fireworks. Few of the audience can have left with much sense of a major event. The rest of the season, which takes place every weekend until 2 August, may well be better pitched.
HE Elsom
|
