Last week was a big one for the niche market that likes to see its 300-year-old music dramas presented “in concert” — though these days you generally get a spot of eye-contact between the performers, and sometimes a lot more (as with the Giulio Cesare I reviewed lately), rather than an old-skool line-up of taffeta gowns and penguin suits staring fixedly ahead.
Jephtha was Handel’s last dramatic work, and like all his oratorios it kind of matters in a way his operas don’t always: big, serious pieces about the price of social cohesion, finding meaning in adversity, kind of foundation texts in the Enlightenment project of teaching new ethics of personal and communal responsibility, secretly preparing Europe for the democracy that would slowly dawn across the continent. Handel and his wordsmiths make this shift by using the chorus much more centrally, operating both in the Greek manner and as “the people”, opening up the dramas from the brilliant observation of toff antics you usually get in the operas to something of far wider application. (A terrible generalisation of course. Ariodante, Xerxes and plenty of his other operas do the same thing through different means.)
That’s how Handel turns the Pollyanna-ish 18th-century convention of the “lieto fine” or upbeat ending to sensible use. The last-minute appearance of the angel-ex-machina who commutes Jephtha’s daughter’s death-sentence could definitely look a bit feeble-minded. But it makes possible a triumph through torment, the sense of human bonds stress-tested to an appalling degree and made stronger, a powerful communal affirmation that was not remotely irrelevant in the England of the 1750s, staggering to its feet after a century of civil and continental (and civil, again) wars and strife.
The terrible situation arises because of Jephtha’s rash vow to sacrifice the first living thing he sees if granted victory over the vile Ammonites. And sure enough it’s not the family mutt that greets him (though I guess that would be tough too) but daughter Iphis tripping out of the house with the laurels and shampers. But the point is that his vow was prompted under serious pressure: this battle is survival or death for the beleaguered Israelites. And in the Book of Judges, unlike here, he follows through, to general approval. Jephtha wasn’t written to be “staged”, and when you see babyish dramatisations like the one they did at Covent Garden a couple of years ago, where Jephtha’s actions were inevitably ascribed to y’know, patriarchy and misogyny, you can see Handel’s point: in a concert we get the whole deal, not some little director’s prattish sermonising.
Last time I heard Il Pomo d’Oro — a high-class European ensemble founded in 2012 — they were torturing Dido & Aeneas under a peculiarly mannered Maxim Emelyanychev, but here they were back on correct and perfect form: a fabulous orchestral performance conducted by Francesco Corti that grew from a slightly tentative start into something deep, furiously virtuosic and dynamically ultra-sophisticated without ever falling into mere affectation. The British concert-world rarely gives people enough rehearsal time to develop this level of detail, which makes these visits of well-upholstered Euro bands special (though the micro-managing of sound can certainly go too far, as noted).
So the chorus has a massive role to play, and the ensemble’s own choir (only 17, quite small for the space) were fanatically accurate and schooled, dour at times (Handel gives them a fabulous moment of projection into the characters of the wild, oppressing Ammonites, with their fun-sounding Moloch-worship, but these guys weren’t really up for it), but nailing the various degrees of celebration, anguish, soul-searching that form the psychological narrative.
Hubristic Jephtha — reduced to panicked despair at the results of his vow — is a terrific role, and Michael Spyres a tenor of much broader and more generous voice than we usually get in the 18th-century world. Handel isn’t the place for Romantic-opera voice-emoting, to be sure, but Spyres rarely let himself even a bit off the leash, purring along like a Bentley when we could have used just the occasional animal roar of an Italian supercar. Still, his first racked accompagnato, “Deeper, and deeper still”, opened up vast gulfs of anguish through purely vocal art; and though the sublime aria “Waft her, angels” fell short of expectations — a bit rough, simply lacking the serenity and barely-contained emotion it overflows with — it still made its mark.
It’s worth saying something about this tune. Jephtha is preparing to kill the girl — and she’s being very public-spirited about it. Handel creates something unbearably heartbreaking and comforting at the same time, not just with the endless, upward-flowing thirds of the voice, but the accompaniment too, a gently vaulting violin line of caressing beauty that emerges gradually from the lower instruments and shepherds this morally-destroyed father through the valley of death.
The other big draw was Joyce DiDonato as Jephtha’s outraged wife Storgè. And while she was as forceful as you’d expect as the Hyrcanian tigress defending her cub, there was something seriously off with the voice, none of Joyce’s usual effortless style and faultless phrasing: tonally weird, unstable across the registers, alarmingly reminiscent of some other well-known mezzos who’ve suddenly gone over. I really hope this was a one-off: at its best this is a voice of unique power, beauty and superhuman expression.
Building a successful, cohesive society might involve making sacrifices. Divided we fall: stick together
Jasmin White gave a very enjoyable, really strong performance as Iphis’s intended, Hamor — a hell of a voice, which just needs a bit more attention to detail. But what actually made the show something else was the Iphis of Mélissa Petit. To begin with it felt a bit thin: bright and pretty but just a bit boring. But as things went on something funny happened: it dawned on you that amid all Jephtha’s jovial roughness, and the general ethos of violence, this was the real voice of innocence, calling from outside the fallen world. And an innocence that can’t be shaken: Iphis duets chastely with Hamor, comes gavotting out to meet blood-boltered, victorious dad with the cutest welcome-home song, with the same radiant love and acceptance that she sings goodbye to the world. It’s the contrast that did it, the way the strength and purity of peace and goodness emerged from and conquered the drab, brutish world of muscle and struggle.
As we know, Handel, old, half-blind and sick, was doing a lot of work with this final piece of his: trying to come to terms with an apparently capricious God and murky, unreadable fate. “Whatever is — is RIGHT”, shouts the chorus, educatedly quoting Alexander Pope. Nobody really seems convinced. But what’s to be done? Handel’s answer (like Mozart’s a bit later) is that love is not necessarily all you need, but it’s all we’ve got. The soloists rejoin the chorus, there is a powerful and genuinely moving sense of reconciliation; this community has learned a knotty lesson. Building a successful, cohesive society might involve making sacrifices. Divided we fall: stick together. Perhaps, even (*shudder*), Be kind. Avoid Twitter. And don’t make bets with God.
