Intimate rendition of Handel’s early ‘Aci’
One of the reasons Handel was so popular among the Italian aristocracy during his youthful sojourn in that country, surely, was that he could be counted on to liven up even the dullest social occasion with a few strokes of his pen.
In July 1708, to take an example not at all at random, Handel ducked down to Naples from Rome for the wedding of the Duke of Alvito. The wedding present he brought along — a two-act dramatic entertainment called “Aci,
“Aci, Galatea e Polifemo”:
Reduced length with orchestra. 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 24. Free. Stanford Hospital Atrium, 300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford; full production with reduced orchestra. 7:30 p.m. May 27. $15. Foothill Presbyterian Church, 5301 McKee Road, San Jose; full production with orchestra and additional chamber music. 3 p.m. May 28. Los Altos Lutheran Church, 460 S. El Monte Ave., Los Altos. www.blackboxbaroque.com
Galatea e Polifemo” — must have been the hit of the weekend, and it cast its spell anew on Sunday, May 21, in a tenderly intimate performance by Black Box Baroque.
Handel’s early Italian period, so often overlooked in favor of the mature masterpieces, suddenly seems to be having a little moment in the Bay Area. It was just a couple of weeks ago that the Amer-
ican Bach Soloists mounted the Easter oratorio “La Resurrezione,” which dates from just three months earlier, and now comes Black Box — the determined Handelian startup founded and led by soprano Sara Hagenbuch — to give us the secular side of the equation.
In truth, of course, those sides are not distinct at all. Whatever the subject matter, Handel even at 23 could produce reams of inventive, beautiful and infinitely varied vocal music that illuminated any dramatic scenario he had to face.
In the case of “Aci,” we have two lovers — one a water nymph, the other a mortal — whose happiness is overshadowed by the relentless romantic attentions of the giant Polyphemus (whether this is the same cyclops who bedeviled Odysseus on his way home or a relative of the same name is unclear to me). Handel subsequently returned to this story, giving it a more comic framing in the English oratorio “Acis and Galatea,” but this version — which ends with a watery love-death that Wagner would have recognized — plays for keeps.
Black Box’s production, a nimble and bare-bones offering, didn’t shy away from the work’s emotional power. The opening performance, staged by director Katie Nix in what seemed to be a large sitting room in the Christian Science Organization in Berkeley, put the audience just a few feet away from the three vocalists and the chamber orchestra, the Albany Consort, led by Jonathan Salzedo.
That meant that the emotional turns of the drama — the characters’ romantic serenity and their fits of anguish, defiance or jealousy — registered with utmost immediacy and transparency. It also meant that the musical execution, in both its splendors and its occasional lapses, was entirely exposed.
Hagenbuch herself shone most brightly as Aci, lavishing her bright and impeccably focused soprano on the role’s sinuous melodic lines and unleashing torrents of alarmingly precise figuration. Mezzo-soprano Ellen Presley was a soulful presence as Galatea, though she would have benefited from more sure-handed and supportive musical direction.
Completing the cast was the commanding bass-baritone Ben Brady, who brought robust life to the giant’s villainy without neglecting to also give his love the requisite touch of pathos. His cavernous, faultless low notes were set in marvelous relief at the end of one aria, where he took the climax in a full-bodied falsetto before plunging several octaves to the very bottom of his range.
That moment was just one of many to underscore the stylistic freedom these performers brought to their assignments — in particular, the ease and imagination with which they varied and adorned the repeated sections that are the formal basis of the Baroque aria. Performing Handel’s vocal music at all is a boon to local audiences; performing it with this degree of freshness is yet a cut above.