Xerxes triumphs

Xerxes is yet another memorable characterization for Hunt, the reigning Handel diva of our day. In a complex serio-comic plot anticipating Cosí fan tutte, a pair of men (the king and his brother) are entangled with two sisters. Xerxes is already betrothed to a foreign princess, but he has fallen in love (into love) with his brother's girlfriend, Romilda, whose sister, Atalanta, is in turn in love with Xerxes's brother, Arsamene. Hunt, carried in on a litter (the Georgian equivalent of Xerxes's tent), is finger-snappingly imperious, callow, self-satisfied, and thoughtless (even beyond contempt) of anyone else's feelings.

But she can afford to risk losing sympathy for Xerxes because she trusts Handel's exquisite score to humanize him. And no one can sing this music with more beauty or bravura, intelligence or intensity. In the most literal sense she's a dynamic singer, because there probably isn't anyone alive with a more mercurial range of dynamics. She weaves so many colors into the plush fabric of her tone that each phrase reveals an entire tapestry of emotional responses. She swells the very first note of "Ombra mai fu" (oops, "You are my love") from near silence into an overpowering crescendo. The variety of her trills and spun out roulades is breathtaking -- you can practically picture each pleasure Xerxes contemplates as Hunt's coloratura cadenza erupts on the last word of "I imagine a world of delights." The aria in which Xerxes alternates between rage over Romilda's rejection and awe at her steadfast love for his brother is only the most overt -- and stunning -- example of what Hunt does with every phrase. And in Xerxes's final aria, which seeks forgiveness (anticipating the Count in Figaro), the transformation is so moving because we believed in him even when he deserved our disapproval.

The audience is blessed with the exceptional partnership between Hunt and her longtime friend and conductor, Emmanuel Music's Craig Smith. Hunt is a singer who can take advantage of a certain amount of rhythmic license. Smith gives it to her, yet they are always uncannily together. In fact, no doubt with the help of continuo-player/assistant conductor Michael Beattie, this is probably the best musically prepared production in the recent history of the Boston Lyric. There is never a point where the singers aren't responding to the playing and vice versa. And who wouldn't respond to such heavenly playing and Smith's articulate, compassionate shaping.

Stephen Wadsworth is an accomplished professional who avoids most of the common pitfalls of staging Baroque opera and who is capable of rising to the creation of inspired bits of business (witty parallelisms, for example: two singers on different parts of the stage doing exactly the same thing). He never lets any of the characters seem merely foolish or a mere stereotype. He also knows the score and makes sure no one does anything musically unjustified. He'll even have one singer "react" to the accompaniment of another's aria (Xerxes, for instance, laughing when his brother pauses).

One of Handel's jokes that Wadsworth plays up is the one about operatic cross-dressing. Xerxes is sung by a woman, Arsamene by a counter-tenor whose tessitura lies higher than the low-lying music of Xerxes's fiancée, who is disguised as a man. When Arsamene's comic manservant disguises himself as a flower-selling crone, he underlines the comedy of all the gender confusion.

Wadsworth's rhyming translation is more than serviceable. An aria by the servant/flower seller rhymes "stranger" with "hydrangea," "regalia" with "dahlia" (a little forced), "azalea," and even "paraphernalia" without sounding like Gilbert & Sullivan, though American colloquialisms like "He's sure not" and "I guess I could" aren't very convincing for either ancient Persia or Handel's England. But even in the most complex coloratura, what a pleasure to have the words come through. Maybe that's why there's so much repetition in Handelian texts -- if you don't get the line the first time, you will by the third or fourth. And Wadsworth's staging of the da capo arias -- though not as profound as Peter Sellars's -- manages to find dramatic meaning in the larger patterns of repetition.

Thomas Lynch's handsome set (evocatively lit by Peter Kaczorowski) is a brick Georgian mansion with a three-dimensional shade tree (the one Xerxes loves), a garden, and a gated back door. It barely leaves room on the small Emerson Majestic stage for Xerxes's servants to turn his litter around. Everything happens as a kind of frieze. Wadsworth compensates for the lack of depth by having action take place not only horizontally but also vertically (singing from second-story windows or on a rooftop balcony). We even get glimpses of scenes behind the windows -- though perhaps not often enough to justify the monotony of the unit set ("Isn't it going to revolve?" someone asked).

The only singing that approaches Hunt's is by the splendid young countertenor David Daniels (Arsamene), whose sweet soprano-like tone remains evenly full and vibrant all the way up the scale. He's got energy and conviction and is a likable presence -- endearingly earnest, if not always subtle in his acting. Amy Burton (Romilda) is a better actress, and she conveys both the pathos and the determination of the besieged heroine. She's technically secure, though her tone lacks shading. Susannah Waters makes a delightfully villainous sister (her lie that Arsamene's love letter to Romilda is really for her leads to an entire act of misunderstandings). Her voice is prettier than Burton's, her technique much less reliable. Baritone John Atkins (Elviro, the servant) is a sturdy technician as well as a skillful comedian -- and comedienne! Dale Travis, an unsteady bass, is nevertheless a convincingly spineless paterfamilias; Kitt Reuter-Foss, a wan mezzo, is less successful in the juicier role of Xerxes's fiancée. The chorus makes a dandy staff of servants.

Xerxes was of one of Handel's last Italian operas before his major move into English oratorio. The scale is more intimate than in such earlier heroic operas as Giulio Cesare and Ariodante, and though the emphasis is still on single arias, Handel here begins to liberate the musical form. In the rare and particularly ravishing duets, you wish the voices here were more evenly matched. Still, with Hunt and Smith at the center of this enchanting, unfamiliar work, the production has already won more than half the battle. I hope the Boston Lyric signs them right up for more Handel.

We've had some pretty high-powered and exciting visitors these past few weeks. Boston Musica Viva gave us British new-music specialist soprano Jane Manning in a gloriously demented and vocally staggering performance of Peter Maxwell Davies's solo mad scene Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, staged by Nicholas Deutsch. The NEC Wind Ensemble, under Frank Battisti, hosted the extraordinary Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie in the US premiere of Thea Musgrave's haunting four-movement tone poem with marimba solo based on a haiku series, Journey Through a Japanese Landscape. Glennie, who suffers from profound deafness, is a phenomenon under any circumstances. Gamine and balletic in bare feet, like some sylph out of a Celtic fairyland, she moves almost as dexterously as she plays. Her encore, a solo for snare drum ("the smaller the instrument, the bigger the noise," she said), had one of the subtlest and most sustained crescendos/decrescendos I've heard on any instrument.

Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic presented a powerful evening of Shostakovich. The 13th Symphony, Babi Yar (1962), is based on a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the German mass execution of Jews in a ravine near Kiev, in the Ukraine. The poet was present and looked prosperous (he now teaches at Queens College and wears expensive suits), though his excesses of rhetoric and gesture underlined how many ways his work is self-serving. The great Russian baritone Sergei Leiferkus, however, sang with a dignity so selfless, he nearly rescued the poems from their own melodrama and sentimentality. Zander, Leiferkus, the Men of the Russian Chamber Chorus (prepared by Andrei Roudenko), and the orchestra have forced me to rethink my low opinion of this piece. The concert began with the oddly charming, sadly celebratory From Jewish Folk Poetry. American tenor Richard Clement matched the lovely Russian-born mezzo Marianna Kulikova in poignant ethnic flavor and vocal fullness, both overshadowing 27-year-old soprano Irina Mozyleva, from Minsk.

The best news was the return to Symphony Hall of pianist Dubravka Tomsic in the Celebrity Series, in one of her most splendid performances. She moved from the deep inwardness at the center of one of Mozart's deepest and most inward piano pieces, the D-minor Fantasia, to the full-out, heroic Romanticism of all four Chopin Ballades, where outward and inward are finally hard to tell apart. In between came one of Mozart's loveliest sonatas, K.332, in F, and four dazzling pieces by Ravel, three from Miroirs (a darting, eerie Oiseaux tristes, Une barque sur l'océan, and a spiky, daringly syncopated Alborada del gracioso) and an electrifying Toccata from Le tombeau de Couperin.

With Tomsic, flawless technique is only the beginning. Her hands stick close to the keyboard, which may account for the clarity, the speed, and the delicate transparency, but not the stupefying power. The encores were wonderfully varied: scintillating Scarlatti, a nervously exhilarating Macedonian Dance by Aloys Srebotnjak (Tomsic's husband), brilliant Villa-Lobos, and the heartstopping lullaby of a Siloti arrangement of a Bach prelude that was further adapted by the late Emil Gilels. The bad news is that it will be two years before she's scheduled to return.