Splendid Handel, If Misdirected

Arianna In Creta
Harry de Jur Playhouse

The Handel opera craze continues with the Gotham Chamber Opera’s mounting of “Arianna in Creta,” in what they purport to be its American stage premiere. For you Handel mavens out there, “Arianna,” from 1733, was written after “Almira,” “Agrippina,” “Amadigi,” “Alessandro,” and “Admitto,” but before “Ariodante,” “Alcina,” “Atalanta,” “Arminio,” and “Alessandro Severo.” Got it?

The performance Saturday night, which repeats tomorrow night as well as Friday, provided an odd mix of often superlative singing, unmemorable though well-crafted music, and a sarcastic, stilted, contemporary production that turned what is meant to be an opera seria into a postmodern farce.

The story concerns itself with the Ariadne myth before her arrival at Naxos. Arianna (in the Italian nomenclature) is saved from the Minatour by Teseo, who is then able to wed her after he discovers she is the daughter of King Minos. Though many of these Handel works contain cookie-cutter commonplaces, they can still make for entertaining, even affecting, nights at the opera, especially if the singing is on target, which it was Saturday night.

Even among so many works of coloratura, the role of Teseo stands out for its immense floridity, and Katherine Rohrer relished the difficulties, giving the high-wire vocal acts a real gusto and admirably balancing her hearty, rich voice and the agility the part requires.

Jennifer Hines stood out in the role of Carilda, the proverbial other woman. She gave an intriguingly burnished hue to her mezzo, which contrasted nicely to the rest of the women. Countertenor Alan Dornak, in the role of Tauride, King Minos’s awkwardly lustful captain, provided a consistent, strong stream of falsetto sound. His lumbering yet imposing physical presence also added to the unusual brew.

While the production by stage director Christopher Alden elicited consistent laughs, it is nevertheless essentially a failure: It treats the whole idea of Handel opera seria as a joke.

We first see the very blonde Arianna alone on stage, crocheting furiously and mechanically like a Stepford wife. Later on she wields life-size, Claes Oldenburg-like, crochet hooks at the audience in a menacing manner. All this would be fine if it had anything to do with the real emotions these characters are supposed to be feeling about love, loyalty, and valor, but it does not. (It must be said, however, that the scene of Teseo in the bathroom – Ms. Rohrer gargling, brushing her teeth, all the while singing her roller-coaster, virtuoso lines – was a veritable hoot.)

I can certainly understand the problems a director faces when confronted with the monotony of these quintessential “number operas,” with their never-ending series of da capo arias. Directed straight, the work would probably not hold up, and it is very hard to take these plots seriously. Yet Mr. Alden goes much too far in the other direction.

The benchmark for low-budget updates of mediocre Handel operas was the performance last season of “Siroe” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in which a delicate, successful balance was negotiated between an ethereal beauty, postmodern self-consciousness, and humor. That production featured the Venice Baroque Orchestra, one of the best early music bands in the world. Yet the orchestra in the pit Saturday, conducted by Neal Goren, did an admirable job, with a lively string section and a sensitive continuo.

For the orchestra, the singers, and the wonderful opportunity to see an opera rarity in the cozy, woody confines of the Harry de Jur Playhouse, this production can be heartily recommended. Just don’t laugh too hard.

– Daniel Schlosberg

Until February 18 (466 Grand Street, Pitt and Willett Streets, 212-598-0400).

The Men Behind The Music

The Orlando Consort
Low Library Rotunda, Columbia University

A historical survey of diplomacy might not seem the most inspired of themes for a musical concert, but the Orlando Consort’s “The Ambassadors” offered a beguiling mixture of Renaissance sound and fury. What distinguishes this British quartet of early music singers from other practitioners of this style is a well-deployed wit, as well as a discerning musical intelligence.

The Orlandos have never, to my knowledge, shown up for work sporting Astaire top hats, tails, and canes, but the look would blend smoothly with their singing of this old music. The group’s inspired exactness in rhythm has an Astairean appetite, too – their virtuosic precision so pleasing you wish chairs could be cleared in the hall so the audience could get up and dance.

Their singing imparts to a cappella 15th- and 16th-century music a convincing fluency as well as a very modern verve. It is also evident in the stylish way they arrange and present their concerts. There is no trace of the dowdy, dour sincerity early music performers convinced of their authenticity inflict on innocent listeners.

They also know how to deal with halls, not just history. Last December, the Low Library Rotunda proved the undoing of the Tallis Scholars, a bigger and more famous early music concession. In the same space, the Orlandos succeeded by standing well forward, on floor level, practically amidst the audience that was grouped on three sides. Unlike the Tallises, their subtly tuned and colored voices, clear and shining, blended seamlessly.

Microphones were used for the spoken passages of the concert, which contained diplomatic letters linked to the eras and places where these Ital ian, French, Flemish, Spanish, and English songs were originally performed. But when singing, the two tenors, baritone, and countertenor (Mark Dobell, Angus Smith, Donald Greig, and Robert Harre-Jones, respectively) were unamplified.

All the songs, by composers such as Busnois, Morton, Desprez, and the ever prolific Anonymous, were given loving treatment. Throughout the evening, lovely, poignant, sometimes rousing motets, songs, laments, and war ditties, as well as the spoken testimonies, enriched our sense of what the people who wrote, sang, or heard this music were like.

It was touching, for instance, to hear a love song by Alexander Agricola in one part of the program and then, in another, catch his name among the dead in a report on a 1506 diplomatic mission that ended in disaster. William Cornysh’s two numbers were sung with such tender shades and words they seemed to moisten the air of the hall, not just the eyes of a few listeners.

It was also a treat to hear two items by Henry VIII – one of which, a love song set in French, must have been for Anne Boleyn, who had just returned from France when she caught the unlucky eye of the king. As an encore, a gorgeous “Adieu comfort” by Robert Johnson, perhaps a confidant of Anne’s, was sung, allowing us to experience one more time that powerful sense of dead facts and faces rising to meet the music in the air.

The aching sense of mortality so prevalent in Renaissance music of all kinds – the Orlandos did hymns, prayers to prevent plague, erotically charged ballads, and drinking songs – was contrasted with another, more elusive aspect: its gaiety. Even when singing for the dead, there is an appetite for life, a delight in feeling, that is untroubled by postmodern ambiguity.

From other voices, this can sound cute, but grounded by their superb confidence in rhythm and pitch, the Orlandos allow listeners to enter the sounds of the past without feeling embarrassed or confused by them, or feeling the itch to condescend or dismiss them. An approach as fresh, earnest, and smart as theirs leaves Renaissance music better off than it was before we heard them sing it.

– Patrick Giles

The Children of Brahms

Brahms the Progressive: Piano Quintets
Miller Theater

Johannes Brahms was very concerned about preserving the great tradition of music. An avid collector of old scores, he lent his avuncular face to the backward-looking side of the Januarian argument that became known in the 1870s as the Brahms-Wagner feud. He even incorporated the out-of-fashion Baroque devices of the fugue, passacaglia, and variation suite into his modern compositions.

Brahms was mercilessly excoriated in the press for his perceived shunning of contemporary music (and eventually asked to resign his post with the Vienna Philharmonic because he programmed too much Bach and Handel.) That he encouraged younger com posers, particularly Dvorak, Ignaz Bruell, and Gustav Mahler, did not save him from the slings and arrows of the hip, Wagnerian crowd of “futurists.”

To this day, and with considerable justification and accolade, Brahms is seen as the epitome of musical conservatism. In terms of the expansion of harmonic language, however, Brahms was an important catalyst for Modernism. In a fascinating series at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, “Brahms the Progressive,” a talented group of chamber musicians is exploring the connection of the music of the old master to that of a later age.

Thursday evening was piano quintet night. A strong case can be made that the Brahms work in the genre is the greatest in the entire chamber repertoire, dense and dramatic, powerful and complex. This performance, by the Ying Quartet with pianist Christopher Taylor, was a bit wan. It furnished a clean, crisp exploration of the structural patterns of the note relationships, but the underlying emotions were severely underplayed. Perhaps it was the very assiduously developed, diaphanous sound-blending of the group itself, but the density of the work seemed much below fighting weight.

Not that there weren’t touches of brilliance. An arresting little crescendo just before the famous false ending in the Finale was especially pleasing. Mr. Taylor provided a solid sense of propulsion, but was much too self-effacing for my taste. Often he seemed to miss opportunities to lend heft to this willowy interpretation.

Mr. Taylor has probably heard legitimate complaints from string players that Brahms’s chamber music is disproportionately designed to feature the piano – its composer would have been the premiere performer – but his reaction is a bit too restrained to properly convey the granitic power of these positively symphonic chamber works.

Anton Webern had a relatively easy time of it during World War I. He was the violist of the official Austrian army string quartet (isn’t it charming, and so Viennese, that, even in wartime, the Austrians had an official string quartet)? He featured the viola in his early – and later disavowed – one-SS movement piano quintet, which the group offered this night. Here there were no discrepancies between the lovely, svelte sound and the perfumed emotional content. The group fashioned a moody reflection of finde-siecle nostalgia, a la Richard Strauss. The connection to the Brahms, other than the obvious identical instrumentation, was nebulous, but the piece was beautiful, so who could object?

In the Piano Quintet from 2002 of Peter Lieberson all the threads of the argument came together. Here was a work definitely engendered by the spirit of Brahms, complete with contrapuntal exercises based on fiddle and folk tunes of Nova Scotia, fashioned with the same tender, loving care as Brahms displayed in molding his beloved Hungarian Gypsy airs. This was by far the best performance of the lot and advocated strongly for a piece that is, really, little more than noodling around – but in such a pleasant, summer-vacation manner that we all went home, perhaps not whistling the tunes, but at least in a happy frame of mind.

– Fred Kirshnit