Thirteen members of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society brought the sweet dulcet tones of historically rendered masterworks of the Baroque to an enthralled Newport Classical audience Friday evening in the sumptuous acoustic of the Breakers Mansion Great Hall, a Gilded Age architectural masterpiece sumptuously decorated and meticulously preserved. Concertmaster Aisslinn Nosky led a group which included soprano Joélle Harvey, Debra Nagy, oboe, and Ian Watson, harpsichord continuo and organ.
Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in D Major Op. 6 No. 1 pitted the concertino group consisting of Nosky, principal second violin Abigail Karr, a continuo group of cellist Guy Fishman, and Ian harpsichordist Watson against the full ensemble. Published in 1714, they were likely compiled from separate movements written and performed earlier. Corelli toured extensively and was in demand as a performer, orchestra leader, and composer; he considered his collection of concerted works adaptable to smaller or larger groups. Opus 6 contains the celebrated Christmas Concerto, but the D major is often programmed as a popular orchestral tour de force.
Joélle Harvey then complied with two Handel arias. “Piangerò la sorte mia” from Guilio Cesare, is the imprisoned Cleopatra’s lament of her fate, believing Caesar has failed in his mission to rout Pompey and has been killed. Set as a typical three-part Da capo aria, the A section displays her sadness of a fate “so cruel and unjust” while the B section gives rise to her agitation and anger as she threatens to haunt the tyrant as a ghost after her death. According to the Baroque Doctrine of Affections, arias would contain a single emotion, though more complex three-part arias could in their middle section contain a second contrasting emotion, before and additionally ornamented da capo. Here Harvey’s consummate skill and taste of the performer shone. Giulio Cesare in Egitto received its first performance at the King’s Theater in London’s Haymarket in 1724 and was constantly updated and revised in subsequent performances, being one of Handel’s most popular Italian opera seria, both then and now. (As an aside, Cleopatra is rescued and enthroned as Queen of Egypt at the end of the opera, only to suffer a worse fate in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.)
In Semele Handel’s attempted to revitalize what was by the 1740’s a quickly fading popularity of the Italian opera by recasting it “in the manner of an oratorio” which reduced the needs of expensive sets and staging, also being sung in English and adding a chorus. The flirtatious and self-absorbed Semele, Princess of Thebes and lover of the God Jupiter, sings of her “Endless pleasure, endless love” seemingly unaware of her impending fate as she immolated by the very same God of thunder when she asks him to shed his human form so she can behold his true form. Out of her ashes the god Bacchus is plucked from her womb to become the god of wine and ecstatic debauchery. While Semele does contain da capo arias, this one, a gavotte (a moderate dance in duple meter) plainly set forth first in the ensemble, and then each line extended offering the singer ample opportunity to display her vocal virtuosity. Again, Harvey was magnificent, casting herself fully in Semele’s glow and ardor with brilliance and ever subtle and tasteful in her ornamentation.
Ian Watson closed the first half as soloist in Handel’s delightful Organ Concerto in F Major, HWV 295 often dubbed “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” Playing a one-manual beautifully designed and voiced portative organ, Watson skillfully combined both solo and continuo through the judicious manipulation of stops. The deep and rich tone of the single 8’ flute stop offered a perfect representation of the cuckoo and trilling nightingale, while the slightly brighter but softer 4’ addition gave body to the ripieno sections, with additional higher sounds providing brilliance and body for the fuller textures of the final fugal sections. At several points Handel designated organo ad libitum, offering the soloist the opportunity to extemporize bridging material between movements, for which Watson provided an elegant introduction to the Larghetto Siciliano (two groups of three to a bar, often containing a dotted 8th-16th-8th note combination for the first grouping, and a long-short configuration for the second) before the closing Allegro. Handel himself had a substantially sized chamber organ in his house, English organs of the time having usually one often divided keyboard, but sometimes two, but no pedal. In the home they folded up into a cabinet and displayed as fine furniture.
The second half featured a lost concerto by Bach and a little-known gem of a cantata by Handel which he titled as a motet. Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C Minor BWV 1060R was lost to us, but scholars were able to reconstruct it from Bach’s transcription of this concerto for two harpsichords and strings. The concerto featured a lively and engaging interplay between Debra Nagy’s oboe and Nosky’s violin, with a somewhat subdued first movement which emphasized finely crafted and elegant phrases tossed back and forth between the two soloists and between the solo group against the full ensemble. The second movement featuring long lines in a slow 12/8 time, the solo lines weaving expressively around each other over an accompaniment of plucked strings, was enhanced by the lute stop on the harpsichord, to which Watson coupled a softer back 8’ stop for some of the tutti sections. The final movement burst forth with joyful virtuosity and pluck.
The gem of the evening, though, brought Harvey back to the full ensemble in Handel’s Silete venti HWV 242. Though designated as a motet, the work more closely resembled the early form of Italian cantata. This is not the formal cantata we think of as in the structured cantatas of Bach, but rather a more elusive and amorphous type of work perhaps best described as a miniaturized form of Italian opera seria, that is, truncated and containing no sets, costumes, or staging with just a few movements threaded together into a compact work, and often a single soloist. This one has five movements beginning with a brief Sinfonia that opens in French Overture style for a brief 10 bars before heading into the fugal Allegro which itself morphs into an accompanied recitative “Be still ye winds” followed by its aria “Sweet love” addressed to Jesus but with decidedly amorous overtones. Another recitative and aria grouping follows followed by a closing “Alleluja”, a presto tour de force for both soprano and ensemble set as a sprightly jig in 12/8. The work, while less well known in the Handel output, is never-the-less familiar, opening with the strains of a later Organ Concerto in B-flat, and containing music borrowed from one of the Chandos Anthems and the oratorio Esther. Far from being a mere compilation of spare parts, the work is tightly cohesive with movements descending a chain of thirds from B-flat major to G minor, to E-flat major coming full circle to B-flat major. Charming and expressive, brilliantly virtuosic and dramatic, with both sacred intent and amorous secular overtones the work is filled with warmth and vitality. In describing the music, the performance of it is described as well, for Handel and Haydn achieved that delicate balance of grace and fire, the dulcet tones of their instruments and their inspired playing of music in the best traditions of historically informed performance brought their love of the art in its highest aesthetic ideals to all who were fortunate to be in the audience.