HGO stages opera worthy of Guillermo del Toro
In “Saul,” the magnificent overture to George Frideric Handel’s 1739 oratorio opens on a dim, but not dark, hall.
For several minutes, long enough for an exquisite oboe solo and virtuoso passage by organist and Rice University faculty member Ken Cowan, the house lights fade and a huge severed head gradually comes into focus onstage. It takes a moment to realize what you’re looking at.
“Saul” caused a sensation at England’s Glyndebourne Festival in 2015 due to renegade Australian director Barrie Kosky’s lavish and provocative staging. Directed by Donna Stirrup, Houston Grand Opera’s revival — the maiden run for an American opera company, onstage through Nov. 8 at the Wortham Center — is grandiose, irreverent, and a little jarring.
All good things. This “Saul” is a gas.
The head belongs to Goliath, but the problems created by the Philistine giant’s death fall squarely on the sagging shoulders of the titular Old Testament monarch. Britishborn baritone Christopher Purvis plays the role with an appropriate blend of high camp and extreme irritability: stalking the stage like a nervous panther, throwing his daughters to the ground and ordering his son, Jonathan, to do away with the usurper David.
Especially after he goes bald, Saul resembles nothing so much as Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.” Purvis animates the king’s madness with vigor and vulnerability, never more so than in a duet with himself as the ghost of the prophet Samuel. He’s not pleased with what Samuel has to say.
As David, at first Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen makes an uneasy manchild-cumsavior. During the opening scene, fresh wounds streaking his torso, the rest of the cast regards David like he’s an alien. It might well be the American countertenor’s otherworldly register; in his Act 1 duet with Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman, as Saul’s excitable yet kindhearted daughter Michal, their voices could be two sides of the same coin.
Cohen’s vocals also mesh harmoniously with tenor Paul Appleby, who makes a noble and charismatic Jonathan. The two instantly hit it off, and their scenes together are fraught with less-thanplatonic implications until Jonathan ditches the formalities and pulls David to the floor. Appleby’s duet with Purvis, as Jonathan pleads with Saul to spare David’s life, is also a standout.
Dynamic soprano Pureum Jo, as Saul’s elder daughter Merab, is haughty and imperious upon learning the king has promised her hand to David, but softens her tone in an arresting, elegiac aria following the climactic battle of Mount Gilboa. A pair of tenors likewise make the most of their brief time onstage, Chad Shelton as a memorable Witch of Endor and Keith Jameson in four smaller roles that keep the narrative humming along.
Both stark and grotesque, Katrin Lea Tag’s production design reinforces the story’s extremes of beauty and brutality. Goliath’s disembodied head sticks around onstage for most of the first act. Tables piled high with produce and roasted waterfowl resemble an Amazonian banquet; the dozens of candles that open Act 2 mourn the fallen warriors of Saul’s army with eerie radiance.
Tag’s costumes combine touches of biblical authenticity (loincloths, namely) with a Restoration-era-on-acid aesthetic. In the chorus scenes, the cast resembles disheveled extras from a production of “Hamilton” who spent last night partying at Numbers. The dancers who periodically peel off from the chorus offer a bit of suggestive frivolity to go with all of the family head games.
It’s all a lot to take in, but the music is up to the task. HGO artistic and music director Patrick Summers, who conducts, is a Handel specialist, and it shows. “It is important that we honor Handel not by imprisoning him with immutable dogma,” Summers wrote in his recent book “The Spirit of This Place,” “but by utilizing our knowledge of his time to create something new and relevant in the context of the modern opera house.”
Full marks here. If anything, the “Saul” score is so sublime it might overshadow a production that played it a little straighter. The soaring trumpets and cascading voices of Handel’s powerhouse choruses — too many to count, really — are easy to get lost in. But Kosky, and now Stirrup and her splendid collaborators, have found a Bible story worthy of Lewis Carroll or Guillermo del Toro.
Now, can Kosky please do “Samson” next?