Too Much of a Good Thing from ABS

Late yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre, American Bach Soloists (ABS) concluded its annual December programming with the return of its Baroque New Year’s Eve concert. This program had originally been planned for the end of 2021 but had to be rescheduled due to pandemic conditions. The full title of the program was A Baroque New Year’s Eve at the Opera, and the program provided a generous share of selections from the operas of George Frideric Handel. That included beginning with the overture of Rinaldo (HWV 7), followed by arias from Giulio Cesare (HWV 17), Radamisto (HWV 12b), and Ezio (HWV 29), an instrumental chaconne from Terpsichore (HWV 8b), and scenes from Semele (HWV 58), including the opening Sinfonia, and a scene from the secular cantata Apollo e Dafne (HWV 122). The program also included a scene from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, an aria from Antonio Vivaldi’s La fida ninfa, and excerpts from Henry Purcell’s King Arthur.

The vocalists were soprano Liv Redpath and bass Alex Rosen, sharing roughly the same amount of performance time and allowing for the occasional instrumental selection. Both of them presented an admirable account of period performance techniques, and Rosen brought engaging physical chemistry to most of his selections. Nevertheless, it did not take long for a sense of tedium to emerge from the nature of the programming.

Those familiar with this repertoire know that almost all vocal arias from the baroque period were structured in an ABA form. One of my teachers like to summarize this structure as follows:

1. Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em
2. Reflect on it
3. Tell ’em what you told ’em

This amounts to the backbone of eighteenth-century opera, providing a useful path to lead the viewer/listener through a frequently complex narrative. However, when individual arias are extracted from that path, so to speak, the listener is left with little more than technical fireworks delivered by the vocalist. Over the course of a two-hour concert program, this is already feeling like too much of a good thing before the halftime intermission.

Perhaps the program would have been more engaging had there been a better balance between the vocal selections and the instrumental offerings.