Review: Academy of Ancient Music – ‘Tis Nature’s Voice
The Academy of Ancient Music, under Director Laurence Cummings, presented Handel’s infrequently performed Italian oratorio Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707) at West Road Concert Hall on Wednesday evening (May 10).
As part of AAM’s current programme (‘Tis Nature’s Voice’), which has been exploring the environment and our place within it, Handel’s ‘The Triumph of Time and Enlightenment’ dates from the composer’s stay in Rome where he collaborated with a hugely influential and well-connected librettist, Cardinal Pamphilj, to produce in the very birthplace of opera and oratorio this early masterpiece.
Making use of established forms in art and literature Il Trionfo is a type of morality play, the medieval genre which presents a struggle between virtue and vice for the possession of the Christian soul.
Shakespeare had used this tradition in his History plays. In Henry IV (Part 1) we see Prince Hal (a version of the Prodigal Son) torn between, on the one hand, the parental example and moral stance of his father, the King, and on the other the ‘values’ of the central vice figure Falstaff, alongside further embodiments of ruling passions, all of whom vie for his attention. Needless to say, the good always tends to win out in the end.
In Handel’s oratorio three figures, Pleasure (a young man) played by soprano Anna Dennis, Time (tenor Nick Pritchard) and Enlightenment (countertenor Reginald Mobley) contest the ‘soul’ of Beauty (soprano Sophie Junker).
The foundation of the oratorio is essentially a religious one tracing the investment of youth in worldly pleasures and youth’s progress, via enlightenment, to the revelation of where truth is to be found – in Christian terms an answer to Pilate’s famous question, ‘Truth – what is that?’
The natural world and man’s place in it (‘Tis Nature’s Voice’) was central to the thought of the soon to be flourishing Romantic movement (Handel died in 1759).
For the Romantics writing about nature was often a way of writing about the self, and Handel’s oratorio, or ‘opera of the mind’, though based on religious truth, explores issues broader than doctrinal ones. Looking ahead, it is as much of a psycho-drama as for example, the Hyperion poems of Keats, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound or Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In fact Wordsworth speaks of the ‘mind’ as the ‘haunt and the main region of my song’. He looks beyond Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained to instruct us ‘in words which speak of nothing more than what we are’ about how Nature alone can stand in for the presence of a numinous redeemer.
As AAM’s Chief Executive John McMunn remarks in his introductory programme notes, all this might seem ‘like rather a lot of work if it weren’t for Handel’s music’.
And indeed that music’s already wonderful qualities, the 21 year-old composer’s ear for sonorities, his gaps and silences and breathtaking changes of texture, were flawlessly performed as ever by the Academy of Ancient Music with its distinguished quartet of voices.
Soprano Sophie Junker as ‘Beauty’, the spine of the work and a role of constant recitatives and arias reflecting an inner debate with her divided self, was seldom out of the spotlight. Yet rising to the oratorio’s demands and to some, at times, particularly challenging sequences with tireless consummate artistry, she retained throughout her seemingly effortless grace and poise.
Anna Dennis as ‘Pleasure’ adjusted her own lovely tones to reflect the different moods of a particular piece, as in the allurements of ‘Chiudi, chiudi’, or in the sulkiness of her reprimand to ‘Beauty’ (‘Tu giurasti’), or in her performance of the overwhelmingly poignant ‘Lascia la spina’, probably the most well-known aria from this work, and a supreme example of Handel’s ear for pure melody.
As mentioned, Truth here is revealed by ‘Enlightenment’, and countertenor Reginald Mobley brought to the role a subdued but nonetheless commanding authority as befitted his presence in the narrative. Especially outstanding was his performance of the slow-tempo ‘Crede l’uom ch’egli riposi’ as was an absolutely spellbinding delivery of the aria ‘Più non cura’.
Nick Pritchard’s ‘Time’ was the perfect complement to ‘Enlightenment’s’ role and his ‘timely’ interventions as in the lovely aria ‘Nasce l’uomo’ as well as the beautifully and rousingly sung ‘È ben folle’ had Director Laurence Cummings bouncing in his seat at the harpsichord, from which it seemed he also sometimes unwittingly levitated as the power of the music carried him away.
There were similar effects on other participants, too, and it was a delight to witness ‘Beauty’ and ‘Pleasure’ duetting and sharing their joy in performance (‘Il voler nel fior’) to the wind accompaniment of oboists Joel Raymond and Oonagh Lee.
Periodically there were memorable such accompaniments, Sarah McMahon’s melancholy cello in ‘Enlightenment’s’ aria on the vanishing away of beauty (‘Se la bellezza’), Joel Raymond’s plaintive oboe in ‘Beauty’s’ aria ‘Io sperai trova nel vero’, and a bravura performance by Alastair Ross on the organ in the ‘Pleasure’s palace’ sequence, with its jaunty rhythms suggesting that perhaps such jauntiness is misplaced in the shadow of higher themes.
This concert, outstanding in so many ways, begs the question of why Il Trionfo Del Tempo is comparatively so rarely performed. West Road’s capacity audience on Wednesday evening roared its appreciation. And with every justification.
JOHN GILROY
