Joyce DiDonato in the title role of Handel’s Agrippina (from the Live in HD Web page for this opera performance)
This past Sunday the recording facility on my xfinity cable box allowed me to save a copy of the latest Great Performances at the Met broadcast. The opera was George Frideric Handel’s HWV 6 Agrippina; and the recording was taken from the Live in HD offering that was presented at the end of this past February (making it, inadvertently, the last Live in HD program of the season). This was a new production of the Metropolitan Opera, staged by David McVicar. The conductor was Harry Bicket, a champion of the baroque repertoire, who played harpsichord for the recitativo passages.
I once attended a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, taught, I am pretty sure, by soprano Carolyn Sampson. Most memorable was her coaching of a soprano and an alto singing the duet “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo” (I gaze at you, I posses you) that concludes Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L'incoronazione di Poppea (the coronation of Poppea). Sampson’s first remark after the performance was, “These are not nice people!” Well, if Nero and Poppea were “not nice” in Monteverdi’s setting, they are downright nasty in Agrippina, matched only by Nero’s parents, Claudius and the title character herself, Agrippina. Indeed, there are only nine characters; and eight of them are equally offensive. The only other character is the goddess Juno, who is supposed to bless everyone else; and her part was cut from the Met performance!
To be fair, she would have been out of place, since McVicar chose to set the opera in a contemporary metropolitan setting, which could easily have been New York. According to its Performance Archive, the San Francisco Opera has presented six McVicar productions, the earliest in 2006 and the most recent in June of 2019. That most recent offering was Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 114 opera Rusalka, and I was so positively impressed that I selected it as the June entry for my month-by-month list of the most memorable performances of that year. The other five were spaced out along an interval from non-particularly-interesting to downright infuriating. (The best example of the latter was the use of a chorus-line-kick in Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which had nothing to do with anything other than self-indulgence!)
The bottom line is that just about everything that happens on stage amounts to a product of McVicar’s capacity for self-indulgence. The frequency of sexual encounters goes beyond anything one might find in Henry Miller and will be sure to “frighten the horses” (as Katherine Hepburn liked to put it). As to the other indulgences, one viable subtitle for the production might be “Little Nero has a Drug Problem.” In one scene he covers a tabletop with cocaine, shaking it out like a can of talcum powder. After his first snort or two, he starts rubbing the stuff all over his face. My guess is that such behavior would have scared the bejesus out of all the the Roman rulers documented by Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars. (At the beginning and end of the production, one of the lesser characters in the cast is off to the side reading that book.) Finally, an entire scene is set in a cocktail lounge, which makes for great visuals (including a second harpsichordist playing the role of lounge-lizard pianist) but manages to muddle most of the key leading characters.
The good news is that, with the benefit of Bicket’s interpretations of the score, all eight of the vocalists more than did justice to all of the heavenly music that Handel wrote. This was my first encounter with mezzo Joyce DiDonato going over to the dark side for the title role. Bass Matthew Rose perfectly complemented her in his performance of Claudius; and, when it came to sins of the flesh, the shape of his beard faintly recalled another powerful figure with a weakness for sexual abuse. The role of Nero was originally sung by a soprano castrato; and the part was taken by mezzo Kate Lindsey, who was never shy about depicting all of the acts of self-indulgence that McVicar had conceived. Poppea was sung by soprano Brenda Rae, who was particularly effective in the cocktail lounge scene. The man that is eventually paired with Poppea at the end of the opera is Otho, originally sung by a contralto but given an outstanding countertenor account by Iestyn Davies. Finally, Agrippina has two “fixers” with elevated positions, Pallas from the military (bass Duncan Rock) and Narcissus from the Senate (originally alto castrato, sung by countertenor Nicholas Tamagna).
This is a performance that will make for highly satisfying listening, particularly if one chooses to ignore the video signal.
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