Tag: Author: Sandra Bowdler

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Graham Abbott, thanks for all the Handel

Sandra Bowdler

Readers of my article ‘Handel Down Under III: the Last 35 Years’ (Handel News, No.67, 2016) may recall my comment that ‘during the late 1990s, a veritable slew of Handel operas was almost single-handedly produced by conductor Graham Abbott’. They comprised 38 performances of five works (Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Alcina, Ariodante, Orlando, Agrippina), spread over the years 1995 to 2000. Neither Ariodante nor Agrippina had been seen in Australia previously. While one of Graham’s runs of Giulio Cesare was under the auspices of Opera Australia (OA) which tends to dominate Australian opera performance generally, the rest were for smaller regional companies (West Australian Opera, Perth; Queensland Opera, Brisbane; Stopera, Canberra), thus bringing Handel operas to a wider audience than OA’s usual Melbourne and Sydney.

Graham’s contribution has not been limited to opera, however. He has conducted many of the oratorios – Saul, Alexander’s Feast, Joshua, Solomon, Athalia, La Resurrezione (both Australian premieres), Israel in Egypt, and Belshazzar with extracts from Samson and A Song for St Cecilia’s Day in concerts, not to mention opera excerpts from Rinaldo and Scipione. Other vocal works under his baton have included Dettingen Te Deum, Utrecht Te Deum, Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, Roman ‘Carmelite Music’ of 1707 (complete, including Dixit Dominus), Cecilia, Volgi un Sguardo and many performances of the complete Coronation Anthems. Orchestral works include concerti grossi, organ concerti, and many performances of the Water Music and the Royal Fireworks. He is also a fine keyboard player.

Graham’s major effort has been with respect to Messiah: 74 performances to date, spread across all the Australian capital cities except, not surprisingly, Darwin – better known for cyclones and crocodiles than Baroque music. Graham has conducted the Symphony Orchestras of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Tasmania, Western Australia, Queensland and New Zealand, with such prominent soloists as the late lamented Deborah Riedel, Leanne Kenneally, Sarah Macliver, Paul McMahon, Robert Macfarlane, Elizabeth Campbell, Graham Pushee, Christopher Field, Sally-Anne Russell, David Hansen, Donald Shanks, Daniel Sumegi and John Wegner. His performances are notable for his deep understanding of the text as well as the music, and respect for the composer, unlike some Australian (and not just Australian) conductors who treat the various versions as a smorgasbord from which variations can be extracted at will. Graham, like Handel, chose versions which suited the forces at hand.

Graham Abbott was born and educated in Sydney, studying at the Sydney Conservatorium and being awarded the ABC(1)/Willem van Otterloo conducting scholarship in 1985. In 1986 he was appointed Conductor-in-Residence at the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, and made his professional orchestral debut with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in 1987. Many such engagements have followed. While Handel is his passion, he has conducted an enormous range of composers and styles of music, from opera to chamber works, spanning the 18th to 20th centuries. He is also well known as a choral conductor.

Graham has, since a lad, been fascinated by musical history covering all periods and styles. With this background, he inaugurated a programme for ABC Classic FM entitled ‘Keys to Music’ (KTM): one hour a week devoted to exploring a particular composer, period, style or technical aspect of classical music – such as, indeed, musical keys. Several KTMs were devoted to aspects of Handel, including a three-part episode on Messiah which was released as a CD set, another on Saul, a programme on Handel’s London operas and more. Many Australian topics were explored. These programmes were immensely popular, being delivered in a friendly communicative fashion which in no way patronised the audience but was directed at beginner and seasoned musical aficionado alike.

Last year, however, the ABC decided to change its whole approach to its Classical FM station, in what appears to be a desperate bid to alienate its considerable number of dedicated followers. From being one of the absolute treasures of cultural life in Australia, it is now it seems trying to attract a young clientele who would on the whole no more want to listen to it than sit through re-runs of ‘Are You Being Served’ and are in any case well catered for elsewhere.

It’s with sadness that I report that KTM will end in mid-January. I was informed of this today. Thank you to everyone for 15 great years!
— Graham Abbott (@GrahamAClassic) 2 November 2017

There are many other examples of the destruction of ABC Classic FM, particularly the removal of anything resembling advance listings of music from every possible medium, but the sudden demise of KTM was a singular blow for many. A deluge of dismayed comments was evident on many Facebook, Twitter and other forums.

Graham of course continues to perform as conductor and teacher in other venues, and will no doubt will delight us with many more Messiahs and other Handelian treasures; for a conductor, he is young yet! To this point, however, his contribution to Handel reception in Australia is already second to none.

Note
(1) Australian Broadcasting Corporation: a government agency responsible for various radio, television and online services. ABC Classic FM is a radio station devoted to classical music.

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Staging Handel: a Response to Ruth Smith and Brian Robins

Sandra Bowdler

In a recent issue of the Handel News, I was much stimulated and entertained by the articles by Ruth Smith (1) and Brian Robins (2) on staging Handel, the former concentrating on the oratorios, the latter on the original staging of the operas. Smith concludes that Handel’s oratorios are better in non-staged performances; Robbins argues that, with respect to the operas, ‘only by seeing them as a totality unifying sets, costumes, gesture and expressiveness that we can truly understand the nobility of this great corpus of works on its own terms’. While finding myself sympathetic to both arguments, I have reservations about realising these ideals in the context of modern opera, and oratorio, performance. My views have been influenced by a long-term interest in the wider field of opera performance and recent experiences of Handel productions at home (Australia) and abroad.

Why do opera companies or other organisations even want to stage oratorios, when Handel has left us some 40 actual operas for the purpose? This is a puzzle, and can perhaps only be answered on a case-by-case basis by directors and intendants. I can hazard a guess with respect to the Sydney opera company Pinchgut Opera. From its inception – Semele in 2002 – the company has been associated with the (excellent) choir Cantillation, and it seems that it has specifically sought works with a large choral component. I think this also applies to the more recently established ‘Handel in the Theatre’ group in Canberra, which arose out of the Canberra Choral Society with Alexander Balus in 2014; though its current name seems odd as it has only performed oratorios, including the forthcoming Susanna. This argument about work for the chorus might also I daresay be applied to Glyndebourne. But why on earth would Halle Opera choose to stage Jephtha, albeit during the annual Handel festival there? Quite apart from its turning out to be a monumental train wreck, why not stick with actual operas? Perhaps modern directors feel that Handel’s oratorios provide more familiar storylines than the very obscure personages that feature in the operas? Although these days the likes of Jephtha, Susanna, Alexander Balus etc. are hardly household names.

The other issue highlighted by Smith is the way the oratorios are staged, with the literal specificity of stage action reigning in the inherent ambiguity of the oratorios’ text and music and thus restricting the imaginative reception by the audience. There is also the fact that modern directors are trying to do things with the oratorios that not only did Handel not intend, but which also do not work in a modern operatic context. It is interesting to consider what might be called the converse.

Smith mentions Wagner. I have attended quite a few successful concert performances of Wagner operas over the years (Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung come to mind). In Tristan in particular, staging is practically otiose: some 90% of the whole work comprises long ecstatic passages of singing during which a park and bark performance is practically obligatory. Those who love Wagner, and (like me) are drawn in by his excessively passionate, verging on decadent, music with its long unresolved passages culminating in orgiastic resolutions, see no need for stage encumbrences. The recent New York Metropolitan Opera production (available online and on DVD) has the sketchiest of sets. Regular opera-goers do not actually need elaborate settings. When it comes to Handel, however, directors and producers seem to feel the need to over-embellish.

Returning to oratorio, the recent Pinchgut production of Athalia, despite being musically outstanding, illustrated much that is wrong in staging oratorios, including some new terrible ideas. Who, outside this production, could possibly imagine that an 18th-century English oratorio needed surtitles translated into English (i.e. modern-day English)? This was almost enough to kill the whole production, with the distraction of having two sets of English words being thrown at you at once. I will not go into what might be described as directorial infelicities – I know my mentioning that there is a pretty explicit sex scene between Athalia and Mathan will be enough to have this readership running screaming from the room – but the director Lindy Hume is known for her desire to seek modern ‘relevance’. But every review I read blamed the work for its lack of dramatic cohesion, development and so on. In one case, the reviewer found that ‘Until the last 20 minutes or so of the performance, there was very little action in the story of the opera; this often made Hume’s job difficult, as she designed the protagonists’ movements on stage’ (3). Bloody Handel, making the director’s job difficult. While this might seem to justify Smith’s view, I can imagine another director taking Athalia and producing something both more like a regular modern opera production on the one hand, while on the other also preserving the underlying 18th-century sensibility. It can be done with Mozart and Wagner: why not with Handel?

In this vein, the way Robins describes modern Handel productions in his first paragraph is essentially correct, but not, to me, a bad thing. Those pared-down austere sets do exactly what Smith suggests in allowing the audience’s imagination to fill in the dark spaces; the ones that do not work so well are those forced into a more particularistic setting (e.g. Rodelinda always now seems to happen in a 20th-century police state) or one of fluffy over-embellishment without any particular regard for ‘authenticity’. I also loved his description of an historical performance, reinforced by a recent visit to the Baroque theatre in Cesky Krumlov (not alas for a performance, although the thought of sitting through four hours of opera on one of the benches is a matter of some trepidation). Someone once said to me however that were I (or any Handel fan) to sit through a full historically performed Baroque opera replete with 18th-century conventions, Gest, costume and so on, I/we would be bored stupid. Actually, I love the productions of Sigrid T’Hooft: her recent Parnasso in Festa at Bad Lauchstädt was utterly blissful, as were her Göttingen performances of Amadigi and Imeneo in recent years, all deploying the full authentic range of Baroque opera performance. But would we want all operas to be performed like that today?

The reality is that there are very few appropriate venues for such productions. Cesky Krumlov and Drottningholm are the only two surviving Baroque theatres in Europe, and presumably the world. Early 19th-century buildings like the Goethestheater at Bad Lauchstädt and the Deutschestheater in Göttingen serve well, but this is not the kind of venue in which Baroque operas can be solely performed if we have some hope of their gaining and maintaining an ongoing place in regular opera-going. Perhaps we do not want that, but if they are not performed in regular theatres they are not going to have much survival potential.

Another recent experience of mine was a performance of Tamerlano at La Scala in Milan, a heartland of the opera experience. The stage there is vast, and an ‘authentic’ performance would be lost in the shadows. What I saw was a huge modern production which relocated the scene to the Russian revolution. The mise en scène comprised an enormous train, occasionally in motion (clever back-projection of trees being rushed past) and more often stationary in the snowy wilderness, with doors opening to reveal interactions inside. Maybe Franco Fagioli as Trotsky was a bridge too far, but it was definitely a popular hit and did not, to my mind, get in the way of the story or the meanings inherent in the text and music. If we want Handel opera to survive and flourish, it needs to be performed in these 19th-century barns alongside the core operatic repertoire, together with the more privileged locations of specialised theatres in the context of festivals and informed audiences.

Notes
(1) Smith, R. (2018). Staging Handel’s oratorios: gain and loss. Handel News, 71, January, 5-10.
(2) Robbins, B. (2018). Staging Handel – now … and then. Handel News, 71, January, 10-13.
(3) Szabo, Z. (2018). Pinchgut brings yet more exciting surprises to opera with Handel’s Athalia. The Conversation, 26 June.