Music happiness

[liv]

ghoti_mhic_uait observed that a really really exciting musical event was happening somewhere just about within travel distance of Cambridge. And initially I'd offered to babysit but we concluded that I was more excited about the concert than she was, so we changed things round so I could go with cjwatson. So last week I got to see the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment doing Semele, Handel's secular oratorio. I'm still bouncing and full of squee a week later.

So C and I started work early in order to be able to leave at 4. I did that ridiculous thing of nipping into the toilets to change into a shiny dress, and then dashed to the station, onto a train and across London to the South Bank. We just barely had time for a delicious meze plate at Troia, based on reviews which criticized it for good food but rushed service. And we took our seats in the Royal Festival Hall just as they were doing last call as the show was about to start.

I can't do justice to how wonderful the concert it was, but I can try to tell you how it was the perfect treat for me. I love Baroque music, and the kind of choral polyphony you often find in church music of the era but without having to feel mildly guilty about enjoying Christian stuff. And I love going to exciting concerts with a partner who is equally excited about the music. Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are among my favourite classical performers; I spent a lot of my student years wistfully yearning to hear them live when their tickets tended to be unaffordably more expensive than most of the semi-professional concerts put on in Oxford. And Handel! With period instruments! And a lovely lovely semi-staged performance, where every note and syllable was bell-clear (which is OAE's signature style), and the singers were clearly just having so much fun.

The plot is just entirely ridiculous, being based on something from Ovid about Juno taking elaborate revenge on Jupiter for dallying with a mortal woman. The principal was just amazing in every way, absolutely gorgeous soprano, and way hamming up Semele as a very horny but rather naive young woman. The high point of a wonderful show was her aria on looking into Juno's deceiving mirror, which contains mostly one line Myself I shall adore / if I persist in gazing, with all kinds of elaborate ornaments, handled exquisitely by Louise Alder. Very silly, but also musically sublime, which was pretty much the tone of the whole thing.

When Catherine Wyn-Rogers appeared about halfway through as vengeful Juno, she almost stole the show, in black and green and purple more or less like Ursula from The Little Mermaid. The men were great too; Semele has a counter-tenor, yay, and James Way was great as Jupiter, whose human form is represented as a diminunitive (I think he was shorter than Semele, though admittedly she was in serious heels) tenor rather than the more obvious imposing bass. The primary bass role instead goes to Somnus, because Juno's revenge plan involves a bunch of unnecessarily elaborate steps including waking up the god of sleep (!), and Ashley Riches had so much fun singing the lugubrious aria Loathsome light about not not wanting to wake up.

We were basically just consumed with squee throughout, both of us. Enjoying the beautiful singing and playful acting, yes, but also the period instruments including a theorbo. Pointing out little details to eachother – cjwatson showed me the cello section where they were holding the instruments on their legs instead of using spikes to lean on the floor, and I spotted the weird curved violin bows. I didn't know that the song Where e'er you walk, was in this, nor that it is in fact written for a tenor. It's one of the things I learned when I was having singing lessons and had fun singing it as a curse, thinking about the literal words of being consumed by vegetation wherever you went.

And Handel, even when he's being silly, is just delightfully Handel. Everything sounds slightly familiar when you know his more famous religious stuff, but we came to Semele completely fresh. Handel just can't resist giving his chorus what are basically hymns, even if he's supposedly in a Pagan setting, and they were just as lovely as the solos.

I think that was about the most amazing musical experience I've ever enjoyed. Well, seeing VNV Nation in New York with redbird most of a decade ago comes pretty close. Anyway I'm so incredibly happy I got to go, and heartfelt thanks to all my wonderful partners for making it possible.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

That sounds utterly wonderful.

[ephemera]

The ven diagram of this concert, the VNV concert and your "now listening" track makes me smile ;)

[jesse_the_k]

What a lovely time! Period instruments near where Handel would have been composing for them is magical.

Finding that point where we can enjoy Christian music without feeling icky is wonderful.

And thanks to your enthusiasm, I'm now hearing VNV Nation for the first time, and enjoying it muchly.

[chickenfeet]

Semele is lots of fun. There's a version with Ceci in the title role and she does the most amazing "Myself I shall adore". Don't miss the last bit. The ornamentation in the da capo repeat is nuts.

https://youtu.be/BUDd-uTvTHc

[seekingferret]

Yay Handel! I don't know Semele, but I almost always enjoy his music. This show sounds like a lot of fun, and with the period stuff as an extra time warp element I always find charming and interesting.

Everything sounds slightly familiar when you know his more famous religious stuff

The not so secret reason why everything always sounds slightly familiar with Handel is that he often, often, basically always was self-plagiarizing. I think Handel wrote like fifteen or twenty great arias and then adapted them again and again.

[cjwatson]

Thanks for identifying the lute-family instrument!

As well as the excellent things you wrote about, I loved the way that the principals stayed in character even while sitting off to the side listening to others sing; it was a subtle but effective bridge between a concert-style performance and a staged opera.

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

Oh, I think we maybe had Where e'er you walk at our wedding? It was the thing I didn't have to organise because I just told Mole to pick.