Uncut Solomon

Plus Deborah Voigt and Maurizio Pollini

by Lloyd Schwartz

After three and a half hours of Handel's oratorio Solomon at Emmanuel Church, Ellen Harris, the Handel scholar who had earlier joined Emmanuel Music director Craig Smith in a spirited pre-concert talk, remarked that she had just heard some of this music live for the first time. In fact, Smith and Emmanuel Music have given numerous performances, some American premieres, of uncut Handel masterpieces and near-masterpieces.

One of the "new" moments Harris was referring to was the final moralizing wrap-up chorus, "The name of the wicked shall quickly be past," which some Handelians consider inferior. It's usually exchanged for the magnificent choral anthem "Praise the Lord" that Handel placed some 10 minutes earlier -- just before the Queen of Sheba's departure and her farewell duet with Solomon. Smith proved that Handel was right, that the music that follows "Praise the Lord" takes on a quieter, more reflective tone that reminds us of and rounds off the austere solemnities of the opening, so many hours earlier.

Solomon, as Smith well knows, is not quite like any of Handel's other oratorios. It has a distinctive shape. The first act shifts from the dedication of the Temple and the tributes to Solomon (read "George II," Handel's royal patron, who was compared to Solomon at his coronation) to an intimate Song of Songs between Solomon and his Queen that's extended to Wagnerian proportions. The second act shows Solomon at work, making public judgments (an enactment of the story of the two women who claim to be the mother of the same baby, and Solomon's inspired solution to slice the baby in half). The last act is the state visit of the Queen of Sheba ("Big-time politics," Smith said), a kind of Purcellian masque in which Solomon shows Sheba the treasures of Jerusalem through the power of music to convey a full spectrum of emotions.

Solomon isn't exactly "plotty." It's part testament, part spectacle, part hymn, barely concealing its calculated political motive. Except for the judgment scene smack in the middle, there's no action, and except for the sequence of love duets, almost nothing intimate or personal. It's one of the least "operatic" of Handel's oratorios. But it's one of the most relentlessly ravishing. The hushed and high-lying "Nightingale Chorus" at the end of act one (ushering Solomon and his Queen to their bedchamber) has to be on the short list for the most gorgeous musical moment of the 18th century. The ceremonial opening pomp of act two, with trumpets and drums, becomes a stunning contrast. And the famous Entrance of the Queen of Sheba that opens act three, with its exotic fanfare for oboes, is yet another jewel. In Sheba's moving farewell aria ("Will the sun forget to streak"), the elegiac tone is created by something like Taps played on a muted trumpet that's not a trumpet at all but two flutes and oboe trilling in unison.

There isn't another orchestra you'd rather hear playing this. Chris Krueger and Julia Scolnik (flutes) and Andrea Bonsignore (oboe) sounded like the perfect trumpet. Beth Pearson (cello), Michael Beattie (organ), and Suzanne Cleverdon (harpsichord) made the continuo "speak" as clearly as the recitatives they were accompanying. The strings, led by Danielle Maddon, sounded as if they'd swallowed lightning.

The cast was primarily the younger generation of Emmanuel regulars. Mezzo-soprano Mary Westbrook-Geha was an imposing (almost monolithic), big-toned, warm-voiced Solomon-in-a-tux (the original Solomon was one of the rare women Handel chose for a leading male role -- like Richard Strauss in Der Rosenkavalier, Handel must have loved the blend of women's voices). Soprano Carole Haber made a sweet but timid Queen -- the love duets barely hinted at the heat of their ardor. The urgently engaged and golden-throated Kendra Colton, whose silences were as expressive as her singing, was the First Harlot, the "real" mother of the disputed baby. Her victory lullaby was heavenly.

"If there's anything worse than playing a Harlot," Smith said at the pre-concert talk, "it's playing Second Harlot" (he likened the latter role to Paula Jones). Pamela Murray sang the glittering, deliberately superficial coloratura pointedly if a bit unsteadily. Tenor William Hite gave the high priest Zadok weight and power. Baritone Donald Wilkinson as the anonymous Levite had his best moment in a splendid, almost Gilbert & Sullivan-ish patter song. Mark McSweeney was luxury casting in a one-liner. The entire chorus could be called luxury casting.

Returning to Emmanuel after a long absence was one of America's leading Handelians, mezzo-soprano D'Anna Fortunato, who in 1979 sang the famous opening aria in the American premiere of Atalanta -- Emmanuel's first major Handel. She was a shining Queen of Sheba, singing with brilliance and bite and, in the last aria, something deeper, more soulful and mysterious.

Smith, of course, gave the entire undertaking its shape and power. I thought the first act felt a little slack. For a while Solomon seemed like the string of fabulous numbers I've always secretly believed it to be. But this may have been part of Smith's strategy of tightening up and building larger-scale climaxes as he went along. It tightened. And it built. By the end, I was convinced it was the coherent, indeed overwhelming masterpiece Smith and Harris knew it was.

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Singing the title role for the 1991 Boston Lyric Opera production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos was a landmark for soprano Deborah Voigt. Since then, she's become an international diva -- she now sings Ariadne at the Met. But she hasn't forgotten her benefactors. She just returned to the beautifully refurbished Shubert Theatre in a generous benefit recital for the Lyric's Fund for Emerging Artists, and to celebrate the 70th birthday of board president Lee Day Gillespie, whose idea of a birthday present was to give the BLO $500,000 (this announcement at the concert got a standing ovation).

Voigt's highly publicized weight loss now allows her, when she chooses, to perform with greater expressive flexibility. This was apparent in the arias she sang in German: a more mature and inward version of Ariadne's final aria, Weber's lovely "Leise, leise" (from Der Freischütz), and some Wagner. She sang Sieglinde in the entire third scene from act one of Die Walkyrie, with a gifted tenor in the Met's Young Artist Development Program, Scott Studebaker, as Siegmund. Here Voigt modulated her grand column of sound to become touchingly intimate, even conversational. Studebaker is a real heldentenor, but he's a stick on stage (a good drama coach could make him a star). He barely looked at Voigt at all. In her most crucial moment of direct address, "Du bist der Lenz" ("You are springtime"), Voigt didn't look at him, either, but the moments she did, she melted your heart.

Her Italian arias (from Tosca, Aida, and Adriana Lecouvreur) demonstrated good diction and breath control but not the slightest hint of the emotional extremities these characters are in. The gears she was stuck in were Loud and Monotonous. The voice was impressive, but that's all there was.

She didn't get much help from Stephen Lord and the ragged pick-up orchestra. He followed rather than led, so everything sagged -- disastrous for both Verdi and Wagner. She also sang a medley of pop standards: a torchy "So in Love," an overly operatic "Stardust," an impassioned "All the Things You Are," an exuberant "It's a Grand Night for Singing." Like Bryn Terfel, Voigt could become a successful crossover artist. Although she knew the Wagner from memory, she resorted to a score for songs that nearly everyone else knew by heart. "So taunt me and hurt me," she growled seductively, then shot a furtive glance at the music stand before singing "So in love with you am I." So much for passion.

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Illnesses forced Maurizio Pollini to cancel his two most recent Boston appearances, but he was finally back at Symphony Hall, playing his own Steinway to a sold-out BankBoston Celebrity Series crowd that greeted him warmly. The program was Chopin and Debussy, and it was one of Pollini's best recitals.

He began with Chopin's relatively obscure C-sharp-minor Prélude, Opus 45, a delicate unfolding rather than an outpouring. That came with the First and Fourth Ballades, in which he created big drama out of abrupt dynamic transitions that belied his reputation for coolness and restraint. Pollini looks more like a business executive than ever -- older, and slightly more gaunt as well. And of course there's never an extraneous gesture, or a melodramatic one, though hitting some chords in the Debussy encore actually lifted him off his seat. The Fourth Ballade had a heartbreaking melancholy, and the sudden simplicity between the great climax and the final coda was breathtaking. In the Berceuse, his touch was so light he almost literally tickled the ivories. The Third Scherzo again emphasized dramatic contrasts between a rich-textured chorale and those glistening, evanescent descending figurations.

The second half of the program consisted of Book One of Debussy's Préludes, which presented an astonishing, magical range of touch that conveyed a dream world of sails (or veils), girls with flaxen hair, interrupted serenades, engulfed cathedrals, Puckish deviltry, and minstrel-show theatricality more vividly than more literal narrative playing usually does.

It's often true that Pollini's nerves start to relax about halfway through his concerts. I didn't feel that nervousness this time. But it was also true that the encores -- Debussy's L'isle joyeuse, with its swirling waves and cross-handed cross-winds (staggering!), and Chopin's exquisite D-flat Nocturne, played with ethereal tenderness, and the scintillating "Black-Key" Etude -- let loose a new level of thrilling abandon that caught the audience, perhaps even Pollini himself, off guard.