Access Atlanta > Arts > Our Reviews > Archives > 2006 > October > 22 > Entry
New Trinity Baroque on Handel and Liars We Love
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW New Trinity Baroque. Saturday at S. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. www.newtrinitybaroque.org.
Always massively popular, Handel’s chaste “Messiah” and “Water Music” eclipsed the rest of the composer’s racy output for more than two centuries.
So why is Handel’s best music — his trenchant operas, dramatic oratorios and cantatas — finally back in vogue?
New Trinity Baroque, Atlanta’s most adventurous period-instrument ensemble, offered some answers Saturday at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in a program called “Handel: Unfaithful Love.”
Scholars can debate reasons for Handel’s resurgence, from the dominance of the early-music movement to filling the void left by the lack of accessible new music. But another, more elementary notion should be examined: Lying is big in our culture. Government leaders, corporate managers and people in the public eye brazenly tell the biggest falsehoods about serious matters, knowing there’s no penalty with the public. Perhaps we’ve come to assume lies are a normal means of communicating.
And if you believe that art mirrors society, Handel is the man of the moment: he loved liars. He loved watching a lie unfold and, like an unchecked virus, slowly and inexorably infect everyone it comes into contact with. Handel reminds us that a lie triggers more lies, spinning off into unpredictable eddies of distorted reality.
New Trinity’s sharply planned and wonderfully performed concert included a pair of Handel’s trio sonatas and three cantatas sung by soprano Wanda Yang Temko, each exploring the lies told to jilted lovers and the ensuing pretenses, cover-ups and self-deceptions, for the perpetrator and victim alike.
Amidst the heart-break and self-pity of “Tu fedel? Tu costante?” (“You, Faithful?”) is the wonderfully ironic line, “If you deny me love, I shall not complain, not I.” Ah, the fibs we tell ourselves to ease the pain.
Handel takes a cinematic approach in “Alpestre monte,” (“Alpine Heights”), where at one point dense chromatic harmonies and a loud thumping heartbeat suggest a sick, twisted mood. (Frustratingly, the program booklet provided translations but no side-by-side Italian texts, a must to fully appreciate the sublime gestalt of words, music, and musical language.)
Yet while Handel’s (and his librettist’s) vocal lines might concern the causes and effects of a bruised heart, the accompaniment often has a pastoral openness and simplicity, and here Handel anticipates the values of the Enlightenment, and specifically Rousseau’s notion that mankind has been corrupted by society and needs to return to a more primitive and “natural” state — since as we know happy shepherds never tell a lie.
Temko, best known as an announcer on WABE-FM, the local public radio station, is also a member of the Atlanta Symphony Chorus and a pure-voiced soprano with early-music training. She was best in the most substantive work of the evening, “Armida abbandonata,” carefully declaiming the recitatives and often floating lovely tones in the middle of her range.
She was never quite the singing actress this music demands, however. Instead of memorizing her lines, she read her music from an oversized black folder, like a chorister, and she undercut the drama with an emotionally-neutral church-choir delivery — rather than locating these life-and-death cantatas in the blazing zone between art song and opera.
Still, Temko’s pleasing timbre of voice and confidence with Baroque phrasing and ornaments is a major enrichment of the local period-instrument scene. One suspects we’ll be hearing much more from her.
Spaced between the cantatas, New Trinity founder and harpsichordist Predrag Gosta programmed small instrument works, each scored for two solo violins and accompaniment. In the context of so much suffering and deceit, the B minor Trio Sonata (Op. 2 no. 1) and G Major Sonata (Op. 5 no. 4) worked as ideal palate cleansers. St. Bartholomew’s acoustics are lively and true, although the sound carries much better, and with much more warmth, when the musicians perform beneath the Rosales organ — as New Trinity did last season — than from the altar.
Permalink | | Categories: Classical Music
