E-Mail This Article to a Friend Right in the eye Opera Boston’s The Consul, Boston Baroque’s Agrippina, and Cecilia Bartoli BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Early in Boston Baroque’s semi-staged concert of Handel’s Agrippina, something happened that put me instantly on its side. Agrippina (soprano Twyla Robinson) wants her spoiled son, Nero (soprano Michael Maniaci), to replace her husband Claudius as emperor, so she can run Rome. Nero is an easy target for his mother’s shameless manipulations. When she was telling him what he must do, director Sam Helfrich had them look each other right in the eye.

This simple gesture of connection is all too rare on opera stages. The night before, in Opera Boston’s The Consul, Gian Carlo Menotti’s political melodrama, Daniel Gidron always had the singers stand three-quarters to the audience — just the way my high-school teacher positioned us in our school musical. Characters seldom faced one another. The Consul (1950) is more "realistic" than Agrippina (1709). It’s based on a true story about a woman somewhere in Europe after World War II who committed suicide because she couldn’t get a visa. But between Menotti’s overripe libretto ("Oh bitter love, this love of freedom!") and all his stagy coincidences, it seldom rings true. Vincenzo Grimani’s libretto for Handel echoes other 18th-century operas — love triangles and almost farcical intrigue — more than it illuminates history. And yet, beginning with that gesture of two characters looking at each other, Agrippina was far more believable.

Handel is, of course, the far deeper and more original composer. Menotti mostly sounds like watered-down versions of the greater composers influencing him: Puccini, Wagner, Strauss, Shostakovich, Weill. Some of his own plot elements — a freedom fighter wounded while fleeing from the secret police, a woman refusing to tell the secret agent where her beloved is or who his friends are — are right out of Tosca. So are some of the tunes, except that Puccini’s are memorable.

The Consul can work given a knowing conductor (like Opera Boston’s Gil Rose), good singing, and skillful acting (as on the VAI DVD with the original lead, Patricia Neway). The idea of people battling bureaucracy is as up-to-date as FEMA. But Opera Boston’s production was only moderately effective. Nancy Leary’s costumes took us right back to the post-war era. Linda O’Brien’s sophisticated lighting made something nightmarish out of the heroine’s dream sequences. In the final tableau, the petitioners turn into flickering ghosts watching Magda Sorel’s suicide — one of Gidron’s few striking inspirations. Set designer Cameron Anderson’s wall of oversized file cabinets and a secretary’s desk elevated high above the waiting room certainly evoked the bureaucratic nightmare, but they also forced the singers to turn their backs either to the audience or to the action.

Joanna Porackova, as the frustrated yet heroic Magda, had passion but little spontaneity. You knew she was going to toss reams of paper into the air long before she did. She posed as if she were in a silent movie, arching her back to lean away from the threatening villain. And her strong voice tended to unravel at the top, though even overacting, she brought the house down with her big aria, "To this we’ve come."

I was sorry Magda’s mother died before the last act. Her teasing and worried lullaby is the prettiest music in the opera, and contralto Marion Dry sang it eloquently. Too bad the cradle was placed behind her so that we, not the dying baby, were its beneficiaries. Baritone Anton Belov did well as the escaping husband, though when he announced that the thing he most wanted to do before going underground was to look at his baby, maybe he should have looked at his baby. As the secretary, soprano Mary Ann Stewart sang expertly, but she was pure caricature, so her final outburst of moral outrage came out of nowhere — this was partly Menotti’s fault, but only partly.

Most of the smaller roles were better. As the petitioner resigned to spending the rest of his life filling out forms and following arbitrary instructions, baritone David Kravitz reminded me of the great Felix Bressart as James Stewart’s best friend, the easily intimidated salesman, in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner. Tenor Frank Kelley as a celebrated magician pulled off his tricks with aplomb. Victoria Avetisyan as the woman who finally gets her visa, Laura Choi Stuart, and Sean-Paul Nackley were all excellent. Patrice Tiedemann as an Italian woman undermined her performance with an unconvincing Italian accent.

Agrippina, on the other hand, was one of Boston Baroque’s best productions. Music director Martin Pearlman sacrificed some precision for rhythmic energy and drama — a good bargain. Sam Helfrich is a post–Peter Sellars stage director. He had Nero sitting at the edge of the Jordan Hall stage playing his iPod while his mother was at her desk reading the Globe. Irony is always contemporary. Later, Nero, in his bid for power, walked through the audience dispensing alms. Also like Sellars, Helfrich responded to the music — his well-timed stage business reflected both libretto and score. Even rarer, he allowed Handel’s quiet moments their own space, never injecting distracting business for its own sake.

Handel’s second opera and first major success (he was 24!) has abundant musical riches and more comedy than you might expect. Both Pearlman and Helfrich mined it for its farcical qualities. Pearlman cut some 45 minutes of recitative, and they were hardly missed, because Helfrich always kept the action clear and amusing: the three remaining hours flew by. A surprise ending had nothing to do with history or Handel (the servant poisons the royal family to take the throne himself, and even then, Agrippina, as unstoppable as Rasputin, pulls a gun on him), but it was a hoot.

Robinson played Agrippina more for laughs than for Handelian irony, with double takes and confidential asides to the audience, somewhat diminishing the stature of one of history’s (and Handel’s) great monsters. Still, her gleeful, lipsmacking villainy was infectious — Nero wasn’t the only one eating out of her hands. Robinson’s voice has an attractive bright timbre, though her rapid-fire, florid "coloratura" rather lacked color. The biggest hand went to Maniaci, who rivals Cecilia Bartoli in technical fireworks and acted with comic flair, and soprano Sari Gruber, whose Poppea mixed minx, realpolitik, and dazzling vocalism. Aaron Engebreth combined refined singing with superb comic timing. Bass baritone Kevin Deas made Claudius into a high-spirited, predatory Don Giovanni (one of his seduction arias predates the Mozart character’s part in the famous "Là ci darem la mano" duet); his horny sexual shivers (they’re in the score) were deliciously apt. Mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore sang voluptuously and played the opera’s one good guy, Otho, with fervor, sympathy, and wit. Sumner Thompson and Eudora Brown were fine as Agrippina’s two pliable suitors, and Brown was even better as the goddess Juno.

Concertmaster Danielle Maddon headed an orchestra of star players that included Peter Sykes and Michael Beattie on twin harpsichords, Richard Stone on theorbo, and Baroque-oboist Stephen Hammer, whose playing in the Boston Lyric Opera production 20 years ago was on the level of the star turns by Lorraine Hunt, Janice Felty, and Nancy Armstrong.

We heard more Handel from the real Cecilia Bartoli Sunday in her exuberant and exquisite Bank of America Celebrity Series concert with Orchestra Scintilla of Zürich Opera. Most of the material came from her latest album, Opera Proibita — selections, some only recently rediscovered, from erotic and devotional oratorios Handel, Caldara, and Scarlatti composed in Rome between 1700 and 1710, when public stage performances were forbidden by the Church. Bartoli was in her usual rare form, especially irresistible in Handel’s sublime, long-breathed "Lascia la spina" ("Leave the thorn"). The long program must have been exhausting, yet her energy seemed to grow with each of her four encores, which included a spectacular rendition of the first section of Cleopatra’s final aria in Giulio Cesare.