One of the high points of my spring visits to Carnegie Hall, these past few years, has been the annual performance by the English Concert of a Handel opera. It is the closest thing to a sure-fire ticket there is, and this year’s was no exception. The opera was Rinaldo, and it was performed concert-style, as always (which means with a certain amount of tremendous acting and some clever costuming), under the expert guidance of Harry Bicket.
We didn’t get Joyce Di Donato this year, but in her place we had the wonderful countertenor Iestyn Davies in the title role—not to mention two other up-and-coming countertenors, Jakub Josef Orlinski and James Hall, in supporting parts which they executed beautifully. Three countertenors onstage at once! This alone was enough to give a rare verve to the production. But then in addition we had Luca Pisaroni, one of my favorite bass-baritones, in the villainous but strangely sympathetic role of Argante; the always-trustworthy mezzo Sasha Cooke in the central pants part of Goffredo; and two new-to-me but equally stellar sopranos, Jane Archibald and Joelle Harvey, as the wicked sorceress and the ingenue princess. That these two were both costumed in clingy, sparkly gowns (the sorceress’s gray and low-cut, the princess’s modest and white), and that the oppositional figures of Rinaldo and Argante wore similar-looking suits, suggested to me that somebody—Bicket is my guess—had a hand in the costuming as well as the other minor but important bits of staging.
Rinaldo, like most Handel operas, features a complicated, patently incredible plot, this time involving the Christians fighting against the Saracens along with a great deal of supernatural collaboration on both sides. (When the wicked sorceress first appears, “She has come straight from Hell,” according to the synopsis—and Archibald played that characterization for all it was worth.) Love scenes turn on a dime, with betrayed lovers suddenly announcing they have stopped being angry and are now back in love. Shape-shifting maneuvers (as in a screwball comedy like The Lady Eve) result in true feelings being revealed by mistake. The villainous characters get converted to Christianity in the last five minutes of the show. All this lends a certain comic element to the piece which would not, I think, have been invisible to Handel himself. The result is a lighthearted, unrealistic romp which nonetheless exposes deep and tender feelings. There is possibly no more beautiful aria in all of Handel, for instance, than the lament Rinaldo sings after he has lost his beloved princess to the wicked sorceress—and Davies did full justice to it, as he did to every grief-stricken or triumphant moment of his performance.
The semi-screwball element was enhanced rather than damaged by the fact that Luca Pisaroni and Iestyn Davies seemed to be acting in two different movies—the bass villain practically twirling an invisible operatic mustache as he grandly lorded it over the stage, while the countertenor hero adopted a much more realistic mode, like an everyday guy caught up in an extraordinary situation. In fact, all the shadings and nuances of every performance contributed something to the whole, and that included outstanding bits by the musicians: Tabea Debus’s birdlike solo on the sopranino recorder, for instance, or Tom Foster’s marvelous (and possibly improvised) unaccompanied excursion on the harpsichord, the like of which I have never heard in any opera before. Throughout, as is always the case in Handel, the voices melded beautifully with the music assigned to them, and thanks (again) to Harry Bicket’s skilled leadership, the period instruments never overpowered the singers. Supertitles enabled us to follow the plot and also to understand the humorous elements of the staging, which was crucial to the afternoon’s total enjoyment—though I guess you could have listened with your eyes closed to the whole three-hour-plus performance and enjoyed it nearly as much, since the purity of the music was galvanizing and unceasing. It was, in short, heaven.