Baroque opera is a slightly difficult art form. People find the repetitions tedious, and the plots trite, but I have always thought of baroque music as having an especially simple beauty which a good production can ignite into joy, excitement and profundity. Have I ever witnessed it? Yes. Have I ever witnessed it for the entire duration of a production? Well, no, but I'm certainly willing to gamble on a baroque opera displaying enough good properties to raise my spirits.
WNO's production of Jeptha is a good enough attempt to warrant your attendance, if you are unfamiliar with the genre. It boasts an imaginative setting from, arguably, a world-class director, and performances, both musical and dramatic, of note.
Strictly speaking, Jeptha is not an opera, but a religious oratorio. As such, Mr Handel, it's composer, could rely less on the spectacle of scenery to entertain and delight, perhaps compensating with more vocal and instrumental depth, so it's by no means disqualified from stage performance. It is written and performed in English and, here, helpfully surtitiled in English and Welsh.
Jeptha, illegitimate son of Gilead, returns to defeat the Ammonites. The setting chosen by director Katie Mitchell, is of an occupied near-monochrome city in the forties or fifties, where Jeptha arrives, with his wife and daughter, in a large, but dilapidated hotel-like interior, where a cross-section of society has rolled away the carpets and is energetically summoning its will to rise against oppressors. People scuttle about constantly with devout urgency delivering documents, setting up meetings and following up historic photo opportunities. In the midst of this activity, measures, occasionally rather desperate, provide the means to delay characters for the full duration of their arias. If, during the wooing of Iphis, Jeptha's daughter, by the officer Hamor, we smell the suspicious odour of a superfluous sub-plot, (all too prevalent in the genre), we need not worry. They'll be in the thick of it soon.
Lighting, by Chris Davey, is a crucial component in sustaining our pictorial interest in the whole experience, and it lurches between heroically Rembrantesque composition and focus, and confused dimness, the downstage area being consistently and mysteriously dark. The scenes are introduced to us by the use of a rectangular iris system where black flying pieces open to zoom out on each location. This is undoubtedly clever, and the changes of scene behind this are remarkably fast, but they inhibit applause in a way which doesn't quite sustain the pace. If ever the arts produce Olympic events, the Da Capo aria, with its dimension of vocal improvisation, would be its hundred-metre-sprint. Fflur Wyn would be a medal hope, tasteful, if not acrobatic, but the iris cut us off from the resonance she somehow had earned.
While I admired the cleverness of the setting, and the effort to sustain its pertinence, I began to feel that the original audience might have viewed the piece as an automatically laudable testament to their beliefs and convictions, which I was unable to share. However, when the activities onstage, in the second act, become progressively more military, echoes of the Warsaw uprising, the liberation of Paris and countless other urban resistance movements, provided me with the chance to confront that which I regard as holy, and at this point the music seemed to resonate with the divine.
A descent into the bloodletting and the wanton destruction of a city battleground is spared us, rather too conveniently, by the reported action of the Cherubim and the Seraphim. While we are groping around for a reason to continue the opera, the ideal conclusion of the drama; a wedding of the hero's daughter with a noble officer, is snatched from our anticipation by a deal we find Jeptha has done with his god. Again, if we find this too purposely contrived, we can always find parallels, reflecting upon the panoply of cruel exigencies inflicted by secret police in the conflicts of our recent history. The regalia of liberation, in this production, is red, but I could detect no specific Soviet references, the colour more likely contrived to slice, for reasons of design, more keenly through the near black-and-white rendering of scene and costuming.
Walking the baroque tightrope between the sourly profound and the patently ridiculous, (particularly, the chorus 'Whatever is, is right,' I find a tricky proposition for a contemporary audience), the production fares well, and, for long sequences, serves the genre very well, indeed, with moments of startling electricity. Performances from the principal women, singing well at the lower reaches of their range, are remarkable. The men, whilst able, fail, as is so often the case, over the agility which the coloratura vocal line requires, but t'was ever thus. An exception is countertenor Robin Blaze, whose apparently effortless tone, clarity and volume is also exceptional. Never rely on a countertenor being this good, and be assured that this production communicates well, even into the cheap seats.
So, I urge, go along and find if you share my idea that you are watching a competition between the divine and boring, and that, despite several lapses from the sublime, you were still engaged at every second.