New 'Agrippina'

This article was first published at The Classical Review on November 21, 2011.

Handel, Agrippina, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, R. Jacobs

Handel composed Agrippina during his period working in Italy, for the carnival season in Venice, from Christmas 1709 into 1710. With a libretto possibly by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani (Handel’s protector in Rome, although the authorship is disputed), although technically an opera seria, it has many unexpected comic elements. Productions tend to fail by over-emphasizing the burlesque aspects, while those that focus on irony and the brutal political intrigues tend to get closer to the work’s core.

As usual, Handel borrowed music from himself and from others (in this instance, Reinhard Keiser, Corelli, and Lully) when putting the opera together. It concerns the Empress Agrippina’s disingenuous machinations to place her son, Nero, on the imperial throne after the death of her husband, Claudius (who was also her uncle, and is here called Claudio). Her scheming is thrown into confusion when Agrippina discovers that Claudio is not actually dead -- a fact that fails to deter her. The plot overlaps in some ways with that of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and the mixture of conniving and comic twists is similar.

Of Handel’s compositional breakthrough by the time of this score, scholar Donald Burrows writes that in Agrippina the composer is able to bend the da capo aria form to address his own concerns for framing the narrative drama, characterizing individual characters, and inking in appropriate moods. Conductor René Jacobs created a new edition of the opera for a production at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 2010, which restores the composer’s first conception of the score by undoing the substitutions and reordering of numbers undertaken for the premiere in Venice in 1709 (where previous editions have tended to take the version of the opera as performed at its premiere as the authoritative one).

The differences are most pronounced in the Third Act, and they yield some interesting results -- perhaps, as Jacobs suggests, in realizing the sleeker, more punchy work Handel envisioned before he had the usual run-ins with the whims of the operatic star system in Venice.

In addition to its musicological appeal, this is a performance of considerable beauty, thanks in no small part to the incisive and beautiful playing of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, which is arguably the best period-instrument ensemble active today. In particular, Jacobs has included all of the recitatives “of a rare expressiveness” (as he describes them in a thorough essay in the attractively presented booklet) and with not a single line cut from the libretto. Jacobs and his musicians assist the singers in getting to the dramatic heart of the recitatives by performing them with beguiling variety, switching continuo instruments (harpsichord, organ, lute, and guitar) for different characters, for example, and using a revealing range of textures and diverting rhythmic variation.

Jacobs, as usual, has assembled a fine cast, all pleasing and able voices. In the title role, soprano Alexandrina Pendatchanska has a thick, low-oriented sound – the same qualities Jacobs saw in her when he cast her as Vitellia in his recording of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (Harmonia Mundi). Indeed, the emphasis on the mid- and low-range recalls the creator of the role, Margherita Durastanti, who was prima donna at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. Pendatchanska is matched with the fluffier, slightly nervous sound of Sunhae Im as the flirtatious Poppea, a pairing also heard in the recent recording of Terradellas’s Sesostri.

Veteran bass-baritone Marcos Fink has an affecting turn as the somewhat dim, trusting Claudio, especially in the charming aria ‘Pur ritorno a rimirarvi,’ with obbligato bassoon -- Jacobs also chose Fink as the Sarastro for his outstanding recording of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (Harmonia Mundi). Daniel Schmutzhard, who was the Papageno on that recording, returns here in the minor role of Lesbo, Claudio’s servant. Countertenor Bejun Mehta, with a voice that may be a size too small, makes the best of the role of Ottone (Nero’s rival for the imperial throne, because he rescues Claudio from death, and for Poppea’s love -- originally a trouser role created within the limited range of the contralto Francesca Vanini-Boschi).

The cast is rounded out by the intense mezzo-soprano of Jennifer Rivera (Nerone), the slightly hooty countertenor Dominique Visse as Narciso, one of the courtiers manipulated by Agrippina (roles both created for castrati), and the rumbling bass-baritone Neal Davies as Pallante (another courtier).

Directed by Nayo Titzin, the bonus DVD, Facing Agrippina (about the Berlin production) is a pleasing lagniappe, providing a few glimpses of the strange, minimalistic staging by Vincent Boussard with stylish costumes by Christian Lacroix. Jacobs had a different Poppea for the Berlin performances, Anna Prohaska, and she sounds better in the role than Sunhae Im, at least in the excerpts on the DVD.

SEE ALSO:
Handel's score

Virginia Opera production (2007)

Berlin production (2010)

David McVicar production in London (2007)

NPR coverage

In Brief: Thanksgiving Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Christophe Rousset leads Les Talens Lyriques, with soprano Véronique Gens, in a program of rarely heard opera arias by Méhul, Gluck, Salieri, and others, from the Palazzetto Bru Zane in Venice. [ARTE Live Web]


• Jordi Savall leads a program of music in honor of Joan of Arc, with Sandrine Bonnaire, Hespèrion XXI, and La Capella Reial de Catalunya. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• Listen to Concerto Köln and the Regensburg Cathedral Choir perform music of Bach, in the Basilica of St. Emmeram. [France Musique]


• A listener at an Osmo Vänskä concert got a little worked up about the conductor's tempo choices in Bruckner in London this week. There is audio. I almost had my own outburst yesterday, at the outstanding concert by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique -- not because of the performance but because the ceaseless fussing of a nearby listener, with her bag, papers, glasses, and countless other things, was preventing me from listening to it. [The Rest Is Noise]


• Watch a concert of music by film composer Nino Rota, with the La Strada Quintet and Richard Galliano. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• Listen to Imogen Cooper play a recital at the Wigmore Hall, with music by Debussy, Beethoven, and Chopin. [France Musique]


• Watch contralto Nathalie Stutzmann perform arias for castrati by Handel and Vivaldi. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• Hearts raced around the world as news came from Finland of the possible discovery of sketches of Sibelius's long-lost eighth symphony. Well, the first notice of these documents is from a few years ago, and their importance in any possible reconstruction of the work Sibelius destroyed is in dispute. The curious can hear a read-through of some of the sketches by the Helsinki Philharmonic. [Helsingin Sanomat]


• Hear tenor Michael Schade in recital with pianist Malcolm Martineau, from the Schwetzingen Festival. [France Musique]


• Watch cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima in performance with the Manchester Camerata. [Medici.tv]


• Les Traversées Baroques perform a concert of Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Gabrieli, and Polish Baroque composers, in Warsaw. [France Musique]


• Watch a production of Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla, from the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. [ARTE Live Web]


• More music from the past decade, with Ensemble Linea at the Festival Musica Strasbourg. [France Musique]


• Herbert Blomstedt conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in Hindemith's Nobilissima Visione (1938) and Bruckner's Mass No. 3 in F minor, with Juliane Banse and other soloists. [France Musique]

Ionarts-at-Large: Boulanger Piano Trio

Chamber music in Munich is a rather dismal affair, necessitating occasional trips to the countryside to hear the likes of Kuss Quartet or Quatuor Ébène. Gauting is one of the more rewarding stops out there, with a discriminating and ambitious chamber season at the “Bosco Theater Forum”. With artists like Konstantin Lifschitz, Arabella Steinbacher, Antoine Tamestit, Ensemble Berlin, or regular guests Quatuor Ébène stopping by the little town some 11 miles southwest of Munich.

This time it was the Boulanger Piano Trio—on enthusiastic recommendation of a musical acquaintance who should know—that drew me out, offering a program of Beethoven, Brahms, and Shostakovich. The trip was easily worth it for the combination of supreme artlessness and great wit. The former was unintentionally supported by the bone-dry acoustic that gave no resonant support to the strings at all. Especially violinist Birgit Erz* looked and sounded as though she had to struggle against the ambience-less surroundings.

It was precisely that struggle that contributed so nicely to the earthy, unfussy, and direct sound, devoid of any beautification. Pianist Karla Haltenwanger supplied the playful wit, meanwhile… amply in the Beethoven Trio in C Minor, op.1/3 and again in the Beethoven encore—the melodious Adagio of the op.11 Trio. In contrast to the glamorous exterior of the three ladies, the playing had a refreshing, surprising plainness and tonal simplicity, with nothing hoity-toity going on: The musical version of (albeit chic) sensible shoes, not glam-heels or ballet slippers.

Brahms, Liszt, Schoenberg, Piano Trios and Transcriptions, Boulanger Piano Trio PROFIL Hässler

In the youthful one-movement Shostakovich Trio op.8/1, the contrast between lyrical (piano) and mechanical (strings)—especially the rough side of the violin—came out very nicely, as did the first hints of melodiousness.

Wit isn’t something that Brahms can be accused of in his music. Anecdotes suggest a quick and caustic tongue, but the music—even of the pretty pretty youngster—is as serious as the dour look on our common image of him, with that enormous beard that allowed Brahms to better hide from women and other unwanted elements. It’s from the bearded 50+ year old Brahms that the Piano Trio No.3, op.101, comes. Although the Trio just recorded it, it was here that struggle turned from virtue to muddle and didn’t seem to play into the strengths so far displayed. Until the last movement, the stormy Allegro molto, that is… when the audience was rewarded with enlivening energy in cohesive shape. Cellist Ilona Kindt, acoustically submerged in a gray background for most of the evening, was at last forced further out into the open by brawling Brahms.

The first three movements of the Beethoven (with that wonderful variation-based slow movement) and that last movement of the Brahms Trio were the recital’s highlights. But they were topped again when it came to the namesake-honoring Lili Boulanger encore “D’un Matin de Printemps”, a superb miniature (in this case in a Piano Trio version) with all the hints of budding modernity and lingering Debussy in under five minutes.

* You wouldn’t, incidentally, know the names of the Trio’s members from their latest CD release—Brahms-Liszt-Schoenberg on PROFIL Hänssler; either oversight or emphasis on the music-making as a unit, not individuals.

P.S. Gauting even offers a piece of Americana: It is home to a top division German Baseball League team, the perplexingly named “Gauting Indians”.

Photo credit: Irène Zandel

David Lynch in Paris

What is David Lynch not up to these days? Elisabeth Franck-Dumas spoke to the American film director, in Paris, where he was releasing a CD, exhibiting his drawings, and creating a new project at Silencio, the private club for which he designed the interior. The article (David Lynch, la loi du silence, November 18) for Libération shows that it can be tricky talking to David Lynch (my translation):

What about the politics of making the club open only to members until midnight? "That's a question for Arnaud (Frisch, the owner). I am not the boss, I only helped with the design." And the name, Silencio, a reference to the legendary bar of Mulholland Drive, did he hesitate before bequeathing it to a real place? "They are the ones who wanted to use the name: I said OK, I like the name Silencio. But this is very different from the club in the movie, everything about it is different. But Silencio is a good name. It's a name that has, how do you put it, that has a kind of magic." He adds: "There is nothing here that could be connected to one of my films. At least I don't think so."

So we are not going to speak about his films, and not really about his many other projects at the moment. His album Crazy Clown Time, somber and hypnotic, which came out on November 8; David Lynch Works on Paper, his book of drawings just published by Steidl; the exhibit Mathématiques, at the Fondation Cartier through March 18, 2012, for which he was a major partner, dreaming up five little moving robots shaped like lamps, creatures enthusiastically developed by the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (Inria) and gifted with artificial curiosity. He placed them in a large egg pierced with holes, where they dance around together, reacting to stimuli from visitors, crowned with grimacing heads in white latex. We would, it goes without saying, have gladly heard him speak about that. But we digress. Silencio it is.

The club, Silencio, is on the Rue Montmartre, in the 2e arrondissment of Paris.

Briefly Noted: Streams of Pleasure

Streams of Pleasure, K. Gauvin, M.-N. Lemieux, Il Complesso Barocco, A. Curtis (released on September 27, 2011) Naïve V 5261 | 1h15

Not long after the Handel aria discs were flooding the market, recitals of Handel duets began to appear: Rosemary Joshua and Sarah Connolly, with Harry Bicket and the English Concert (Chandos, 2010); Sandrine Piau and Sara Mingardo, with Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano (Naïve, 2009); Carolyn Sampson and Robin Blaze, with Nicholas Kraemer and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (BIS, 2006); Natalie Dessay and Véronique Gens (and friends), with Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d'Astrée (Virgin, 2002). Alan Curtis, after a lovely selection of duets from Handel's operas, with Patrizia Ciofi and Joyce DiDonato (Virgin, 2004), has released a follow-up recording, this time of arias and duets from the English-language oratorios, dating from 1744 to 1750 (including the rarely heard Joseph and His Brethren and Alexander Balus). The results are equally hard to resist, especially with singing by two Ionarts favorites, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux and soprano Karina Gauvin. Curtis's instincts in Handel, as usual, are spot-on, neither underplaying nor overselling the music's emotional punch. Minor pronunciation tics that mark the singers as non-native English speakers (the word "the" is a dead giveaway), but one can listen without the booklet texts and understand every word. Lemieux sings with forthright and broad tone, the chest voice burnished and full, and Gauvin is as shimmering and sparkling as ever. All the duets are carefully balanced between the two voices. Solo highlights include Lemieux's seraphic "As with rosy steps the morn" (Theodora) and Gauvin's heart-rending "Can I see my infant gor'd?" (Solomon).

Jean Linard's "Cathedral" for Sale

Jean Linard, the visionary artist who created a bric-à-brac "cathedral" in the town of Neuvy-Deux-Clochers, near Bourges, died last year. Without his careful attention to the property and the slightly crazy mosaic-covered artwork he filled it with, the site has fallen into disrepair. Patrick Martinat has a report (Vend cathédrale, art brut, bel ouvrage, November 17) for Le Monde (my translation):

The inheritors of the property not knowing how to keep up such a sanctuary, the whole installation has suffered in a disturbing way after its first winter without its creator, even though it was not a harsh one, which is a bad omen for future ones. This spring yet more damage to a split buttress, with shards of ceramic around it, has shown the urgency of the situation. Local communities, asked for help, have not quite known how to respond to the present owners. They have for now approved several ways to profit from the site, which had a relatively stable summer despite the absence of any caretaker on site.

While various government entities consider whether to protect the cathedral as a site of historic importance, the heirs have begun to look into ways of auctioning off parts of the work to interested buyers.

Briefly Noted: Anonymous 4 and Las Huelgas

Secret Voices, Anonymous 4 (released on October 11, 2011) HMU 807510 | 58'27"

After recent discs of Christmas music, both new and re-released, Anonymous 4 has turned again to the Las Huelgas Codex for its new recording. This famous Spanish manuscript was copied between 1300 and 1325 for the Cistercian convent of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas in Burgos (see this catalog of the music in it). This monastic house was a wealthy foundation, like others in Europe, that counted among its professed nuns a number of noble ladies (see Jo Ann McNamara's Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia). The Cistercian order preferred more austere music for its liturgies, but the codex contains pieces of the greatest sophistication, apparently intended for performance by these highly educated and musically discerning sisters. (Or was it? The main copyist of the codex was a male scribe, and some scholars believe that the sisters had a choir of trained male clerks to perform at their services.) It is hardly the first time the Las Huelgas pieces have been recorded -- other fine recordings have been released by Sequentia, Discantus, and the Huelgas Ensemble, among others -- but the selection of music, forming a Lady Mass and abbreviated Office (in honor of the Virgin Mary), is particularly pleasing (and reminiscent of one of the group's best recordings). A few infelicitous intonation issues, both in monophonic and polyphonic pieces (and not the tremulous interpretation of unusual neumes in the chant pieces), though minor in the grand scheme of things, are an unfortunate blemish. Still, this is music that hits Anonymous 4 in their wheelhouse, and another way to listen to the intriguing pieces in the Las Huelgas Codex is always welcome. Students learning solfege will especially enjoy the discant piece ("Fa fa mi / Ut re mi"), marked in the codex with the corresponding solfege syllables as a way to teach how to sing proper intervallic relationships.

Interview with Gabriela Lena Frank

Charles T. Downey, Gabriela Lena Frank Comes to Annapolis (The Washingtonian, November 15):

Gabriela Lena Frank, Hilos (inter alia), ALIAS Chamber Ensemble, Gabriela Lena Frank (piano) (2011)

The Annapolis Symphony Orchestra is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and its future looks bright. It has released a debut CD on a new self-published label, and received a generous donation from Elizabeth Richebourg Rea (in honor of her father, Philip Richebourg), which has underwritten the anniversary festivities and then some. ASO music director José-Luis Novo has bravely made room in his programming for contemporary music, and this weekend’s concerts (November 18 and 19 in Annapolis’s Maryland Hall) will feature the local premiere of a recent piece by American composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who will be composer-in-residence in Annapolis for the next two seasons.

La Llorona, written in 2007 for the Houston Symphony and their principal violist, Wayne Brooks, is an evocative tone poem for viola and orchestra. Lasting about 20 minutes, it tells the story of a llorona, or “crying woman” spirit, a legend known in many Latin American countries that depicts the weeping ghost of a murdered woman, often by a river’s edge. The composer has summarized the story as a “portrait of the internal shift that happens as the llorona accepts her new existence.” In seven sections, played as one continuous movement, the music follows the spirit as she awakens from slumber, tries to escape, witnesses the dance of chullpas (Peruvian skeletal spirits), hears the comforting song of the moon, and ultimately accepts her fate and sinks into the shadows. [Continue reading]