11/11/2023 0 Comments Semele sweet gj sentinelAfter this time, he concentrated on oratorios and musical dramas with English texts. Handel's last Italian opera, Deidamia, was performed in 1741. Today Semele is frequently fully staged and receives regular performances at many of the world's opera houses, as well as performances in concert form.īackground Interior, Theatre Royal Covent Garden where Semele was first performed Semele was performed four times during its original run, and twice again later the same year, but those were the only performances in Handel's lifetime. It is distinguished from Handel's operas by the large number of polyphonic choruses. Semele has a secular text with a story involving an adulterous sexual relationship. However it was not what London audiences were expecting of an oratorio during the solemn season of Lent. Semele was presented during Lent, one of Handel's regular oratorio seasons. The work fuses elements of opera, oratorio and classical drama. The work contains the famous aria "Where'er you walk". Handel also referred to the work as 'The Story of Semele'. The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses and concerns Semele, mother of Bacchus. Based on an existing opera libretto by William Congreve, the work is an opera in all but name but was first presented in concert form at Covent Garden theatre on 10 February 1744. The choral singing, as one might expect, is sensational.Īt Glyndebourne, East Sussex, until 26 August.Semele ( HWV 58) is a 'musical drama', originally presented "after the manner of an oratorio", in three parts by George Frideric Handel. In the pit, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment play with impeccable style for Václav Luks, though his conducting seems overly urgent at times, robbing the scene where Semele and Ino listen to the music of the spheres, for instance, of its sublimity. Nussbaum Cohen sounds astonishingly beautiful as Athamas, though Mariño disappoints, his voice too small for the venue. Both mezzos are outstanding, with Johnston’s formidable hauteur superbly contrasted with Wake-Edwards’s passionate intensity. Jackson’s Jove, more calculating, less overtly besotted than some, sings Where’er you walk with almost considered seductiveness. Harvey, however, is impressive in the title role, pushed a bit perhaps in the coloratura of No, no, I’ll take no less, though O sleep, why dost thou leave me is ravishing. The real problem here, however, is Thomas’s frequent misjudgment of the work’s tone: much of this is neither funny nor erotic, and until the mood sours in the final act it ideally needs to be both. We soon, however, begin to understand the ennui that makes Semele an easy prey for the machinations of Juno (Jennifer Johnston) and Iris (male soprano Samuel Mariño), though why the former is got up in what appears to be a traditional costume for Turandot, in an otherwise modern-dress production, is anyone’s guess. Mount Cithaeron, where Jove instals her as his mistress with her sister Ino (Stephanie Wake-Edwards) for company, is a bit more lush than Thebes (the grass is longer), albeit hardly, in this instance, the Arcadia evoked in both text and score. Machinations … Samuel Mariño (Iris) and Jennifer Johnston (Juno) in Semele. Thomas, however, is thinking more in terms of emotional and sexual rebellion, and her Thebes becomes an anonymous modern landscape (it looks like scrubland), where Joélle Harvey’s Semele, already pregnant by Stuart Jackson’s Jove, longs to escape from both the prurient mockery of the community around her and the arranged marriage that her father Cadmus (Clive Bayley) is trying to force her into with Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s Athamas. Handel took as his text a libretto by William Congreve, previously set by John Eccles, about the relationship between desire, ambition and opportunism. It’s a striking coup de théâtre in an otherwise somewhat lacklustre staging and a dour take on what is essentially a barbed Restoration comedy. When we reach the denouement, the eponymous heroine – the mortal mistress of Jove, fatally tricked into demanding he cast off his human disguise and reveal himself in his full, cataclysmic divinity – is immured in a massive wicker effigy of her rival Juno, which goes up in flames as the chorus look on. Handel collides with The Wicker Man in Adele Thomas’s production of Semele at Glyndebourne.
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