A lost masterpiece of English opera revived
Julian Perkins and Cambridge Early Opera dust off John Eccles’s 1706 Semele – and it’s a scintillating triumph, says Berta Joncus
Anna Dennis (soprano), Richard Burkhard (baritone), Helen Charlston (mezzosoprano), Héloïse Bernard (soprano), Graeme Broadbent (bass) et al; Cambridge Early Opera; Academy of Ancient Music/julian Perkins
AAM AAM012 121:27 mins (2 discs)
John Eccles’s sexy, sparkling opera bursts to life – finally! Shelved in 1706, Semele has never been professionally recorded, so this production was worth waiting for. Cast, band, director and sound are all top-notch, restoring Eccles’s score to its full glory.
The project grew out of Julian Perkins’s November 2019 Cambridge Handel Opera Company concert performance, with rising-star soloists singing alongside the more seasoned professional names.
It’s astonishing that Eccles’s Semele is obscure: the libretto, by William Congreve, is as yummy as Eccles’s music. Adapting Ovid, Congreve has Semele joyously join Jupiter in illicit love, escaping thereby an unwanted earthly match. Jupiter’s enraged wife Juno, in the guise of Semele’s sister, goads Semele to trap Jupiter into granting her wish that he show himself to her as a god, which kills her.
Thanks to Perkins’s deft casting, each principal’s vocalism and dramatis persona are wonderfully matched. As Semele, Anna Dennis is at first seductive in her delicacy, then frightening in her steely-toned ambition. Dark-timbred mezzo soprano Helen Charlston’s Juno flares magnificently, unafraid to sound ugly when furious. Baritone Richard Burkhard captures Congreve’s sensual yet
thoughtful Jupiter, texturing every word. The show-stealer is soprano Héloïse Bernard who, as Juno’s servant Iris, forges riveting moments from modest material, such as ‘Thither
Flora the Fair’. In this brief chaconne, Bernard drapes each stanza in increasingly gorgeous embellishments, dropping dramatically into chest register for her last verse.
The Academy of Ancient Music’s playing is just as fascinating. Perkins directs from the harpsichord with a demonic intensity. When individual band members take over the storytelling, their solos gild Eccles’s invention with their own. Lost instrumental numbers – symphonies, dances, ritornellos – known on the page only from stage directions, are here taken from other Eccles compositions. They give the AAM further opportunity to strut, from the regal Overture (from his Rinaldo and Armida), to the sparkling ‘Dance of the Zephyrs’ (from his Aires).
Helen Charlston’s Juno flares magnificently, unafraid to sound ugly when furious
Eccles’s solo and instrumental writing are both exquisite, but he experiments most boldly in his vocal ensembles. In these, catchy tunes and rhythms belie the sophistication of counterpoint and motivic networking as entwined solo voices typically yield to regal choruses or symphonies.
Perkins commands a gamut of responses to the ensembles’ charms, from crystal-clear voicing to big, fat homophonic swells. The Act I quartet ‘Why dost thou thus untimely grieve?’, in which four characters each express a different foreboding, captures both Eccles’s originality and the performers’ brilliance: after introducing the common theme, the soloists, taking their cue from Perkins’s keyboard playing, gently decelerate their points of imitation to bring the quartet to a brooding close.
With early career vocalists among the cast, there are minor imperfections, but this is a superb reconstruction of a lost Eccles masterpiece. PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
John Adams
My Father Knew Charles Ives; Harmonielehre
Nashville Symphony/
Giancarlo Guerrero
Naxos 8.559854 69:03 mins
The title of John Adams’s 2003 symphonic triptych My Father Knew Charles Ives intrigues and misleads. Adams’s dad did not know the celebrated American composer – at least, not literally. Instead, the work refers to shared familial connections with New England, where both Ives and Adams once lived. The first movement, ‘Concord’, evokes the sounds of
Adams’s hometown (rather than the Massachusetts location from which Ives’s Second Piano Sonata takes its name). Here and in ‘The Lake’, Adams plays with pastiche, invoking Ives’s signature off-stage trumpets and layered, crosspurpose melodies. A short clarinet solo provides an autobiographical note to recall the instrument Adams learned as a child, while a solo piano represents his father’s own musicianship. ‘The Mountain’ is more recognisably Adams, discarding disparate polyphony in favour of a more homogenous swirl. Throughout, Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony have a steady handle on this deeply personal homage.
Like My Father Knew Charles
Ives, Harmonielehre has a similarly evocative title that recalls Schoenberg’s textbook. But its style and structure owes little to the Second Viennese School; instead, the 1985 work reflects Adams’s early alignment to minimalism and tonality. The first movement – pleasingly entitled with a single em dash – is an epic display of repeated patterns and a pulsing energy that is referred to again in the ethereal third movement (‘Meister Eckhardt and Quackie’ – named after a 13th-century mystic and Adams’s then four-month-old daughter, naturally). These sandwich ‘The Anfortas Wound’, which rumbles on listlessly. Despite this blip, there is much to enjoy among these Adams rarities. Claire Jackson PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★
Beethoven
Egmont Overture; Romances Nos 1 & 2; Symphony No. 5 Mathilde Milwidsky (violin); National Symphony Orchestra/ Rimma Sushanskaya
Guild GMCD 7826 60:10 mins Recorded in October last year, this Beethoven disc from the National Symphony Orchestra is another marker of the composer’s 250th anniversary,