E-Mail This Article to a Friend Festive and tragic spirits Emmanuel Music’s Jephtha, the BSO’s L’enfance du Christ, and Collage New Music’s Le marteau sans maître BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

It must be so" — the almost throw-away opening phrase of Jephtha, Handel’s last completed sacred drama — is really a foreshadowing of the central theme the composer will develop over the next three and a half hours, just as the deceptively simple question that opens Hamlet — "Who’s there?", a literal question of identity spoken by a minor character — echoes and re-echoes in the bewildered hero’s later questioning of his very existence ("To be or not to be") and later still in his resigned acceptance of mortality ("Let be"). Those simple verbs of being become the foci around which Shakespeare’s elliptical play pivots. Similarly, that opening statement in Jephtha occurs again at the climax of the oratorio, the halfway point, where we discover, as in Hamlet, that the opening remark is less a statement of fact than a profound moral question to be wrestled with, a matter of life and death.

Jephtha, in the Book of Judges, has sworn to sacrifice the first person from his house who comes forth to meet him if he leads the Israelites to victory over the children of Ammon. That person turns out to be his only child (she’s unnamed in the Bible, but in the oratorio she’s called Iphis, a name that recalls another sacrificial daughter, Iphigenia). Jephtha brings himself to the brink of madness by his recognition that however much he loves his daughter, he is not free to break his vow. This time it’s the main character who repeats that first phrase: "It must be so." And the chorus that follows ("How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees!") ends with the insistent repetition of Alexander Pope’s line, as famous in its time as Hamlet’s famous line, "Whatever is, is right."

During the composition of Jephtha, Handel was on the verge of going blind ("How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees!"). Nowhere in his work is the issue of accepting the inevitability of human suffering more personal or deeply felt. Or more ambiguous, despite the reverberating repetitions of that opening phrase. If Handel isn’t exactly protesting too much, he’s at least casting a shadow of doubt on that dictum. And that ambiguous shadow pervades his beautiful and moving score.

"Whatever is, is right" and "It must be so" have grim implications in our own world of suicide bombers, the Taliban, and searches for imagined weapons of mass destruction. Not that either Craig Smith and the musicians of Emmanuel Music or the audience that filled Emmanuel Church on Boston’s coldest January 10 in recorded history for Emmanuel’s performance of Jephtha necessarily had any of these implications in mind. But Handel’s ambiguous tone, beginning even in the Overture (solemn? lamenting?), surely expressed a mixture of feelings no one these days could be unfamiliar with.

The last time I heard Jephtha was in 1998, when David Hoose led an even darker performance with the Cantata Singers, with a number of the same singers and players. But inside a church, Handel’s obedience to God’s will took a more positive spin. Iphis, like Isaac, is rescued by an Angel, who allows the victim to live — though only in chastity. In the final duet and quintet, Iphis and her beloved Hamor pledge to continue to "adore" and "esteem" each another at a distance, and everyone joins a genuine celebration of following "virtue’s path" and being "free from war’s destructive sword."

Smith’s history of conducting Handel — beginning at Emmanuel in 1979 and in more widely celebrated productions staged by Peter Sellars — is legendary. Listening to the magnificent Emmanuel Orchestra throughout Jephtha was like hearing a film director on the alternate soundtrack of a DVD, the voice of empathy and authority, responding to, explaining, and making you feel every emotional nuance in the arias and choruses, infiltrating the accompanied recitatives. Smith does more than react — he also shapes each aria and ensemble and quietly builds an enormous and powerful structure. For an act and a half, Jephtha seems as if it were going to be a work about military victory, ending with universal praise to God for supporting the winning side. But then Handel pulls the rug out, and everything that has led to your expectation of exultance turns into the source of deepest sorrow. Smith captured this teasing sense of false expectation but also, if you were listening carefully, the pervasive undercurrent of tragedy.

The chorus is one of the major forces here. In one remarkable moment, by repeating the first two lines of Jephtha’s victory aria, it expands the proud personal statement into a kind of national anthem. The 20-voice Emmanuel Chorus is made up of some of the best singers in the area (including at least one who has previously sung a major role in Jephtha). As Israelites, as priests, even as virgins, it sang with complete conviction, and awe-inspiring beauty and fullness of tone.

In the title role, tenor Frederick Urrey had the right idea of starting out as a gruff-toned military leader, risking an edgy, rather unappealing sound, then allowing more sweetness into his voice as his suffering increases. This was a smart and well-sung performance. His best moment was the great accompanied recitative "Deeper and deeper still," with its extreme shifts from bellowing self-hatred to inarticulate, near-sobbing silences at the horror of what his rash vow has wrought ("It must be so"). Where he fell a little short for me was in his phrasing. "Hide me, earth, in thy dark womb," he sings, but the word "dark" seemed rushed and unpointed. In one of Handel’s most sublime utterances, the aria of resignation, "Waft her, angels, through the skies," the near-deranged Jephtha is actually addressing the angels (just before a real angel comes to the rescue). But Urrey sounded as if he were talking about angels: "Waft her angels through the skies." And perhaps the roughness earlier inhibited the smoothness of a true legato.

Soprano Jayne West conquered the coloratura challenges of Iphis, and I loved the way she changed the timbre of her voice from a lovely, youthful sweetness to a richer, more mature sound when she offers herself in sacrifice (Frederick Brandao was her eloquent obbligato flutist in two arias). I’m still impressed with the fullness, power, and articulateness of countertenor Jeffrey Gall, as Iphis’s beloved Hamor, more than 20 years after he first sang the roles of David and Orlando for Smith (and nearly six years after his Hamor with the Cantata Singers). Mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal seemed to live the impassioned Storgè, the outraged lioness of a wife and mother. Her second-act air, "Let other creatures die," was a high point. Baritone Mark McSweeney forced his light voice a little, but he was convincing as Jephtha’s blustery brother, Zebul. And despite some twittery grace notes, soprano Krista Rivers was perfectly cast as the Angel.

BERLIOZ’S RADIANT POST-CHRISTMAS ORATORIO L’enfance du Christ ("The Childhood of Christ") is another infrequently heard choral masterpiece. I was sorry to miss the Chorus pro Musica’s well-received original-instrument version last month but happy to have another chance to hear the work (2003 is the bicentennial year of Berlioz’s birth), with Raphael Frühbeck de Burgos leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first program of the new year. Here, too, the superlative choral singing (the Tanglewood Festival Chorus performing from memory in a variety of roles, good guys and bad, on stage and off), orchestral playing, and the loving tenderness of the conducting were what I’ll remember best.

Except for one small role (the soldier Polydorus), none of the singing was bad. New Zealand tenor Keith Lewis was a fine narrator, singing of Herod’s paranoid effort to exterminate all the Hebrew children, of the flight of Mary and Joseph into Egypt, and of the kind Ishmaelite who takes in the holy family. (How I’d love to have heard the great African-American tenor Roland Hayes sing Berlioz’s exquisite passage about the "lovely carpet of soft grass and flowers" on which the holy family rest on their flight — an excerpt conducted by Pierre Monteux in 1923 that marked the BSO’s first presentation of any part of this score.)

Swiss bass-baritone Gilles Cachemaille made a particularly touching Joseph. Met mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer sang beautifully but rather without urgency as Mary. French baritone Laurent Naouri evoked remarkable sympathy for his frightened Herod. British bass Robert Lloyd endeared himself as the Ishmaelite. And Boston tenor William Hite (the outstanding Jephtha of the 1998 Cantata Singers version) was excellent as the anti-Herod Centurion, whose first line is "Qui vient?" ("Who’s there?").

Frühbeck de Burgos conducted the three parts without an intermission, and the one drawback was that in the middle of the third part, everything came to a dead stop for the Ishmaelite’s three children to set up their music stands in order to chase the holy family’s cares away with a lovely trio for harp (Judy Saiki Couture, not Ann Hobson Pilot, who was credited in the program) and two flutes (Elizabeth Ostling and Marianne Gedigian, correctly credited). The most magical moment was the last, when the Narrator and Chorus sing of "such a great mystery" and the Narrator’s "Amen" quietly overlaps the hushed "Amen" of the off-stage voices, then of the chorus on stage.

COLLAGE NEW MUSIC began the new year with one of its most elegantly constructed and played programs. It started with the voice of mezzo-soprano Janna Baty (last June’s oversexed Duchess in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face) mouthing vowels that finally turn into the words "O King" in the late Luciano Berio’s 1968 elegy for Martin Luther King, who had just been assassinated. (With eight voices, this became the second movement of Berio’s Sinfonia.) And the concert ended with Baty’s voice dissolving into wordless vocalise at the end of Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître ("The Hammer Without a Master"). In between were Collage’s young composer-in-residence Matthew Van Brink’s engagingly jazzy Whims and Wisps, Bernard Rands’s sumptuously evocative . . . in the receding mist . . . , and the late Donald Sur’s very last piece, a mysteriously consoling yet unsettling lullaby, Berceuse, perhaps his own elegy. BSO violinist Catherine French and pianist Donald Berman gave it an unforgettable performance.

When I was coming of age, Le marteau, a nine-movement fantasy using three surrealist poems by René Char ("I dream my head on the tip of my Peruvian knife"), embodied my idea of "new music" — the title’s unrestrained tool of destruction and creation an image of everything knocking around in an artist’s brain. In the refined hands of Collage director David Hoose, Baty, and the captivating ensemble of guitar (William Buonocore), alto flute (Christopher Krueger), viola (Anne Black), xylophone (Craig McNutt), vibraphone (Robert Schulz), and percussion (Jeffrey Fischer), Boulez’s half-century-old masterwork sounded fresher and more consistently startling than most pieces of newer music.