Opera is an extremely complicated art form, perhaps the most complicated form ever invented. It partakes of music, obviously, and drama, to which it is closely allied, but also poetic literature (for the libretto), visual art (for the stage sets and costumes), and technology (for the lighting, set movement, sound effects, projections, and all sorts of other still-to-be-invented additions to the genre). It can feel as ancient as a Greek play or as new as yesterday’s newspaper headlines; still, even a new opera is bound to draw on its historical antecedents, and even one that’s centuries old must be rendered moving and understandable to a modern audience. A seemingly flexible form, it nonetheless has many fixed guidelines and requirements. Every opera contains a multitude of moving parts—dozens if we count just the musicians and the singers, hundreds and even thousands if we include every musical sequence, every dramatic mo-ment, every set or lighting change—and each one must interweave with the others for the whole thing to succeed. As the director Yuval Sharon wrote in his book A New Philosophy of Opera, “The most accurate description I’ve ever heard about opera remains Terry Pratchett’s perspicacious observation that ‘opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.’”
One advantage to staging an opera concert-style is that you reduce the sheer number of those things. This is not the only reason to perform an opera in this way (I will get to the others in a moment), but it is a good, solid reason. By subtracting the sets, the costumes, and most of the acting, the conductor—who is usually also the director in these cases—can zero in on the music and the singing. Depending on how musically powerful the opera is in the first place, a lot can survive this extreme surgery, and what remains may be significantly easier for the audience to take in. Without the distractions introduced by a strong-minded director, we listeners can feel that we’re having a more direct experience of the music as the composer originally intended it. I don’t mean to disparage strong-minded directors: for me, they are what make or break a good production, because they bother to think out why the characters are acting in this extreme way, and what that extremity might have to do with our own lives. I have seen a bad director ruin an otherwise musically perfect performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre, and I have watched several good directors rescue versions of the Orpheus-Eurydice story, whether by Gluck, Telemann, or someone else, from the basic idiocies of that plot. Given this extreme variability, I always find it a bit anxiety-producing to go into an auditorium not knowing whether I’ll be in the hands of a good opera director or a bad one. The opera in concert eliminates that anxiety.
Some operas lend themselves more easily to concert-style performances than others. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an unstaged performance of one of the grand nineteenth-century Italian operas—I’m talking Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini—and for the most part I haven’t wanted to see one. That preference will be challenged this coming fall, when Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic, led by Gustavo Dudamel, start their five-year collaboration with an opera-in-concert performance of Puccini’s Tosca. (I’m reserving judgment for now.) Wagner, too, strikes me as a composer who needs a full production, but that prejudice will also be tested by Carnegie, which is planning to bring in Gianandrea Noseda to conduct the full Ring cycle over the course of the next season.
What I am used to seeing in concert are operas like Berg’s Wozzeck and Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust. The latter was so clearly composed as a kind of oratorio that one hardly ever encounters a full production; I certainly haven’t. Of the Damnation of Fausts I can recall, the most memorable was a 2008 version conducted by Valery Gergiev in the new-built Mariinsky auditorium, a modernist monstrosity located just down the street from the gemlike old Mariinsky opera house in St. Petersburg. The performance was memorable not because the singers were outstanding (though they were) and not because the musicians played every note perfectly (though they did), but because Gergiev himself was such a visibly diabolical presence. To better appreciate this, I moved at the intermission from my regular seat out front to one of the balconies overlooking the stage from behind. This meant that I could actually watch Gergiev’s face as he indicated to the musicians, mainly with his fierce eyes and fiercer eyebrows, when it was time for each of them to enter. I couldn’t help feeling that the penalty for any individual failure would be a long stay in Hell, or at the very least Siberia.
Wozzeck, on the other hand, works equally well staged or unstaged. I saw a great one at the Metropolitan Opera some years back—it ended with the orphan child galloping his wooden horse round and round the stage—and I’ve attended a number of competent ones elsewhere over the decades. But two of the best Wozzeck performances I’ve ever seen were concert-style versions: the first in 2012 at what was then called Avery Fisher Hall, and the second in 2022 at Carnegie. The former, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra, starred Simon Keenlyside in the title role and Esa-Pekka Salonen as the conductor; the latter, a Boston Symphony production conducted by Andris Nelsons, featured a little-known but excellent Dane named Bo Skovhus as Wozzeck and the brilliant Christine Goerke as Marie. Wozzeck is short in length but extremely powerful, and it should ideally be performed without intermission, so that we have no chance to escape the intense emotions both the music and the plot arouse in us. That seamlessness can of course be accomplished at the opera (and was in the case of the Met performance), but it somehow works better in a concert hall, where the energy of the orchestra and the singers is laser-focused on us, allowing us no room to relax.
The very best concert-style operas I’ve seen—and to which I return repeatedly, year after year—are the series of Handel operas presented by Harry Bicket and his English Concert orchestra. For years I arranged my spring schedule so that I could catch their Carnegie appearances, which took place annually sometime between March and May. Now that they also perform at Cal Performances in my hometown of Berkeley, I can watch the show on whichever coast I prefer. Carnegie Hall has certain built-in advantages: its acoustics are deservedly renowned, and the setting is classically elegant, especially in comparison to Berkeley’s lumberingly brutalist Zellerbach Hall. On the other hand, it’s nice to be able to walk to the matinee performance from my house, take in the full three or four hours in the company of local friends, and repair to one of Berkeley’s excellent nearby restaurants afterward. Neither experience is to be disdained—unless, of course, you are a Handel-despiser (of which there are several among my acquaintance: they don’t seem to realize that all those repetitions are a feature, not a bug).
My first exposure to the English Concert’s Handel series was in 2014, when they performed Alcina during their spring visit to New York. I love Alcina—I have always loved Alcina, ever since I first encountered it during Pamela Rosenberg’s revolutionary stint at the helm of the San Francisco Opera—so I expected to be somewhat disappointed with a merely musical version. But “merely” had no place there, on that Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall. For one thing, the cast was outstanding, starting with Joyce DiDonato as Alcina herself and going on to include Alice Coote, Christine Rice, and a host of other terrific singers. For another, the piece was not exactly unstaged, but semi-staged in an effortless way, with costuming, gestures, and dramatic delivery that fell somewhere between a plain recital and a fully performed opera. The soloists embodied their characters fully, in a way that we could see as well as hear. At the same time, there was a kind of intimacy to the event, a “we’re all in this together” feeling, of a sort that can only arise when a few of the formalities have been dispensed with. As opposed to occupying a separate world to which we in the audience were just external witnesses, these singers and musicians all faced us, acknowledging our presence even as they charmingly inhabited their roles. The only person facing away from us was Harry Bicket, who conducted the proceedings from his harpsichord—but even that back seemed to smile at us invitingly.
Since then I’ve heard the English Concert do Rinaldo, Serse, Ariodante, Rodelinda, and one or two others from among Handel’s forty-two operas and musical dramas. With each season the cast would change, but it never declined in quality. For Rodelinda, for instance, we got Lucy Crowe and Iestyn Davies; Rinaldo featured Luca Pisaroni and Sasha Cooke. And the singers I haven’t listed by name (most of them previously unknown to me) usually turned out to be just as stellar as the famous ones. Apparently Harry Bicket has ways of finding great new people even as he continues to draw on his older stalwarts. His judgment and his practice methods are both so good that the whole company seems to come together every time, as if the singers and musicians had been jointly rehearsing forever. He allows (or perhaps even directs) his soloists to act as much or as little as they like, and the result is an experience that somehow feels as if it were taking place in our living rooms —that is, if we had living rooms the size of a king’s or an emperor’s. It is this quality, finally, which displays the true advantage of the concert-style opera over the fully staged one: it somehow invites us to be part of the show.
My most recent experience in this vein was the English Concert performance of Hercules, which came to Zellerbach Hall this past March. Perhaps because Hercules is one of Handel’s oddest operas (and they are all pretty odd, plot-wise), I was more than usually aware of the kinds of irrationalities that might otherwise have been explained away by a comprehensive directorial vision. This opera takes as its subject the death of Hercules, but in a weirdly cleaned-up version no doubt aimed at the morals of an eighteenth-century English audience. In the original Greek story, as put forth in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Hercules returns from a foreign conquest in the company of a beautiful captive princess, Iole, with whom he is sexually involved. His jealous wife, Dejanira, in attempting to win him back, gives him a magic cloak that is poisoned with the blood of one of Hercules’ prior victims, who has tricked Dejanira into believing that the garment can restore her husband’s love, whereas it will actually bring about his agonizing death. But with an eye toward their contemporary market, Handel and his librettist, a clergyman named Thomas Broughton, eliminated the extramarital affair—a move which makes Dejanira seem unreasonably jealous, and converts Hercules’ demise into a pure and unwarranted tragedy.
Still, Handel never likes to leave us with a tragedy, so right after the hero’s death and apotheosis, we get the usual Handelian joyous ending. Hercules’ son Hyllus is to marry Iole, the world is liberated from its sullied past, and everyone is invited to celebrate. Strangely ambiguous lines like “Tyrants now no more shall dread / on necks of vanquish’d slaves to tread!” and “All fear of punishment is o’er: / The world’s avenger is no more!” stream past in the libretto, which concludes with an inexplicable tribute to the “freedom” and “peace” we are enjoying now. The delightful music, in its manic cheer, more than matches the upbeat mood, especially in the rousing choral conclusion. No doubt this finale was intended as a compliment to Britain’s reigning monarch, George II, but it has little or nothing to do with the fraught emotions generated in us by Hercules, Dejanira, and the other characters we have just spent the past three hours with. I was left feeling whiplashed. So, perhaps, was the original audience: at any rate, the opera’s 1745 premiere proved to be one of Handel’s most disastrous, both critically and financially.
A concert-style production, however, makes it easier to leave such concerns behind, in part because the characters never seem as real as they do in a full opera. And if you are a fan of Handel’s music, Hercules certainly contains some wonderful tunes, especially in the choral passages that conclude each of the three acts. Those sections, sung by the brilliant Clarion Choir, were uniformly excellent in the Berkeley performance, and so were all the instrumental passages performed by the English Concert’s marvelous musicians.
For once, though, I did not feel that Bicket’s five chosen soloists were equally up to snuff. Hercules, sung by the bass-baritone William Guanbo Su, was everything he should be: strong, charismatic, emanating self-confidence, and with a beautiful rollicking way of delivering his coloratura-like arias. Hilary Cronin, who played Princess Iole, had a lovely, meltingly accurate soprano voice and a clear, moving way of speaking her lines. Best of all was the countertenor Alexander Chance, whose delivery was so perfect, both musically and in terms of diction, that his smallish part as the page/narrator seemed at times the most important in the show.
In contrast, the filial role of Hyllus faded in the hands of the distinctly uncharismatic David Portillo, whose harsh tenor occasionally seemed unable to keep up with the musical notes. But Hyllus is a relatively small part. Much more unfortunate was the casting of this production’s Dejanira, who should be the central character in any Hercules, but who here was only half-achieved by the mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg. Hallenberg is, or was, a great dramatic singer—I was charmed by her Ariodante when I saw it in Sweden some years ago—and she can still act with intense, visible emotion. But her singing has diminished to the point where she could barely get across either the jealous-rage scene or the guilt-driven mad scene, both of which are crucial to the Dejanira role. At the eighteenth-century Drottningholm Palace Theater, which is where I saw her in Ariodante, she only had to reach 450 or so patrons, all seated close to the stage; here in Berkeley she was performing in a 2,000-seat modern auditorium, where strong vocal projection is essential. On that Sunday afternoon at Zellerbach, I found it painful to watch Hallenberg struggle against the normal effects of aging on a professional singer’s voice—though perhaps that struggle added, albeit subconsciously, to my sense of her as the cast-off Dejanira. In the end, her vocal failures seemed both more affecting and less annoying than they would have been in a fully staged version of the opera, because the concert style transformed her only halfway: even as she became the outsized, mythical Dejanira, she also remained an ordinary mortal, offering up her all-too-human singing for the pleasure of her fellow humans.
Wendy Lesser, founding and current editor of The Threepenny Review, has a new book, Berlin Before and After, due out from HarperCollins in September.