Picture c/o the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork
If I had been to explain an opera composer summoning the orchestra to depict the creation of the world after which, on the finish, summoning that orchestra to then depict its destruction…you would possibly assume I used to be speaking about Richard Wagner. 136 years earlier than the primary full Ring cycle was carried out in Bayreuth in 1876, George Frideric Handel premiered his Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (setting a poem of the identical title by John Dryden) on the Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. In it, Handel summons the orchestra to depict the creation of the world, then its vanishing.
In contrast to Wagner, Handel makes use of music and phrases to depict creation, setting the phrases of the poet John Dryden:
When nature beneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And couldn’t heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from excessive:
“Come up! Ye greater than useless.”
Then chilly, and sizzling, and moist and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And music’s pow’r obey.
On the finish we get the world dissolving once more:
So when the final and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on excessive,
The useless shall dwell, the dwelling die,
And music shall untune the sky.
Handel’s cantata is devoted to the patron saint of music, and it celebrates and meditates on music itself, an virtually postmodern meta-musical work. There isn’t any actual try at a story right here, however a list of music’s significance to humanity. Even Wagner’s tetralogy, steeped in Schopenhauer, didn’t try one thing as (elegantly) heady as Handel’s musical treatise and within the area of a single hour, as an alternative of 18.
When Handel wrote Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, he could be forgiven for doubting the facility of music. His opera profession was all however completed. His London viewers grew uninterested in Italian opera and embraced ballad operas like John Homosexual’s The Beggar’s Opera, itself a brutal satire of Handelian extra and silliness. It’s a satire based mostly on some reality. Handel’s operas have their charms, depth, and nice magnificence. They will also be formulaic, lengthy, and dramatically leaden affairs by which the drama is subordinate to the abilities of the singers.
As his opera profession pale, Handel turned towards oratorios and cantatas to maintain himself in entrance of the general public. It’s from this pivot that we get masterworks like Messiah and Semele (sarcastically each have been staged as operas many occasions since Handel’s loss of life). In 1729, Handel set John Dryden’s poem Alexander’s Feast for efficiency on St. Cecilia’s Day, one other piece of music in regards to the energy of music. Just a few years later, a revival was on the books, however Alexander’s Feast was too brief to carry out by itself. Composed in simply two weeks, due to some heavy borrowing from current instrumental works (and from the keyboard works of Gottlieb Muffat), Handel tacked on Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day onto its predecessor. It was successful.
After the opening sections depicting a form of historical past of melody and concord (actually and figuratively), every part focuses on a particular instrument (so as: trumpet, flute, violin, organ, lyre, organ once more). Handel pairs every instrument with the human voice: both tenor, soprano, refrain are a mix thereof.
To conclude its annual San Francisco Bach Pageant and its 2025-26 season, the San Francisco-based interval instrument ensemble American Bach (comprising the American Bach Soloists and American Bach Cantorei) offered a ringing account of Handel’s cantata on the Caroline H. Hume Live performance Corridor on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
By means of a brief curtain-raiser, the orchestra provided Georg Philip Telemann’s Concerto in A-major for 4 violins and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D-major. Each had been serviceable and nice, if to not the extent of the Handel. Frankly, the items appeared a bit tacked on to make this system of ample size. The Handel cantata was the star of the present, and the ensemble rose to the event.
Music Director Jeffrey Thomas marshaled his orchestra and refrain for a captivating and fleet efficiency of the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day. A advantage of Thomas’ conducting is that he won’t ever let moss develop on a rating. His Bach and Handel are by no means heavy or penitential. Thomas can also be a tenor, and I wish to assume that he has a singer’s intuition for what makes a piece interesting to an viewers. A small, lithe orchestra additionally helps (and is far more in step with the forces Handel would have had at his disposal). On the similar time, he doesn’t rob the music of its majesty when it wants it. Handel’s oratorios and cantatas are sometimes operas in disguise, however works like Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day are additionally self-conscious (and superb) musical occasions, meant for events, for public ceremonies.
That sense of splendor is entrusted to the refrain, and the American Bach Cantorei did exactly as Handel requested. When the refrain entered for the primary time on the phrases “From concord, from heavenly concord”, there was concord — and it was heavenly. The Cantorei will not be a big refrain (not even 20 members), however they crammed up the live performance corridor like a refrain twice its dimension with out pushing too arduous or sacrificing purity of tone. Handel clearly loved writing choral music (maybe the truest signal of his adopted Englishness), and whereas the harmonic writing isn’t ornate and even essentially sophisticated, it exhibits off a refrain whereas additionally probably exposing its flaws. No such flaws to fret about right here.
Steven Soph was the tenor soloist. A latest assessment of a Mozart efficiency celebrated his “virile lyric” sound. And virile it was. On this creation of the world that I cited earlier (“From Concord, from heav’nly Concord/This common body started”) it’s the tenor who intones it. A number of tenors want to assume the voice of God is a tenor’s voice, and that’s how Handel casts it right here. The just about army thrust of Soph’s voice was extra Huge Bang than God shaping chaos into matter. Soph’s sound is layered and baritonal (he’s no willowy Ian Bostridge), which gave his Handel an exhilarating muscularity. But it surely additionally robbed the music of some class and made a few of his English diction a bit woolly.
(From proper) Steven Soph and Nola Richardson
Later, when the tenor reappears to double the trumpet (“The Trumpet’s loud clamor/Excites us to arms”), Soph’s voice was a a lot better match. Handel’s writing for tenor will not be for the faint of coronary heart. Soph’s tendency to hurl himself on the music was sensible right here, no matter some on-the-tippy-toes notes within the highest reaches of the voice (forgivable given Handel’s octave leaps). His is a burnished sound which paired completely with the pure trumpet. Talking of inauspicious leaps, pure trumpeters William B. Harvey and Charles Ryan deserve medals for a way they negotiated Handel’s writing on an instrument notoriously tough to play in tune, not to mention precisely. They acquitted themselves superbly.
Nola Richardson, no stranger to the Bay Space early music scene, was the soprano soloist. I received to see and listen to her in Rameau earlier this 12 months with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and her Handel was frankly simply as achieved. Actually, hers is definitely probably the most flawless lyric sopranos I can ever bear in mind listening to within the live performance corridor. Her concurrent mastery of each bel canto method and early music ornamentation make her a real gem. What additionally helps is her laser beam accuracy and purity of tone. No scooping, no affectation, no fuss. As such, the voice conveys genuine pathos.
Handel doesn’t do his soprano fairly as soiled as his tenor, pairing her with two fairly mellow devices, first with the cello (performed with lilting focus by Gretchen Claasen in “What ardour can not music increase and quell!”) and later with the pure flute (a pitch-perfect however difficult-to-hear Bethanne Walker in “Orpheus may lead the savage race”). This solely left Richardson extra room to captivate the room with excellent legato phrasing, one thing Handel completely calls for from his singers (by no means forgetting his roots in Italian opera).
In contrast to the tenor, the soprano’s position is much less about asserting music’s energy than it’s to enjoy its magnificence and painting music as one thing that connects us to the divine:
However oh! What artwork can educate
What human voice can attain
The sacred organ’s reward?
It’s a rhetorical (and ironic) query. Handel’s writing for the soprano reaches and yearns, one thing Richardson’s voice does with such ease with out turning into syrupy. The tenor virtually should combat to be heard, the soprano is allowed a sure ecstasy.
That’s maybe the genius of Handel. In a secular oratorio based mostly on a Seventeenth-century poem that might have been a tutorial train, Handel manages to embody a lot of what makes us human. Some days we combat to be heard. Some days we sit again and take inventory. Some days we strive for one thing higher, greater, extra exalted.
I personally discover Handel’s oratorios and cantatas extra compelling than his operas. Stripped of the pageantry and particular results, the inventory characters and inventory conditions, Handel’s music is uncovered for the alternately charming and shifting stuff that it’s. In Dryden’s poem that varieties the libretto, the speaker asks: “What ardour can not Music increase and quell?”
Handel takes this as his thesis and his problem. What a wonderful technique to honor St. Cecilia’s Day.
