Happy Hercules!

Emmanuel Music's Handel, Peter Lieberson's new BSO commission

by Lloyd Schwartz

Two Liebersons took Boston by storm last weekend: 1) Peter Lieberson, the composer son of Columbia Records executive Goddard Lieberson (who was responsible for giving us the great legacy of Stravinsky's recordings of his own music and a brilliant series of original cast albums including My Fair Lady and Gypsy) and Vera Zorina (one of Balanchine's prima ballerinas and former wives, a movie star, and the haunting narrator on numerous recordings -- Columbia recordings -- of 20th-century pieces that require a speaking voice); and 2) Lieberson's newlywed wife, the mezzo-soprano formerly known as Lorraine Hunt, arguably the most exciting classical singer of this generation. Both were in town for major personal events: Lieberson for the world premiere of his latest BSO commission, Hunt Lieberson for a nostalgic return to her artistic alma mater, Emmanuel Music, to sing one of the greatest roles in the repertory that made her a figure of international importance, Handel oratorio.

Peter Lieberson's new work is Red Garuda (a garuda is a giant red-orange bird of Hindu and Buddhist mythology), and it's a big, old-fashioned romantic piece for piano and orchestra, a tone poem long on color, atmosphere (down to the wind machine), and narrative incident, full of attractive (and some familiar) modern dissonances, rather short on memorable melody, yet thoroughly engaging and entertaining. It starts like Debussy (La mer), then sounds a little like Rimsky-Korsakov (Scheherazade), a little like Stravinsky (Petrushka), a little like Gershwin (the Concerto in F), a little like the pulsating soundtrack to Jaws, and rather a lot like all of these playing simultaneously. Seiji Ozawa and the orchestra seemed better prepared than they often do for premieres, and pianist Peter Serkin (for whom Lieberson wrote his first BSO commission, his 1983 Piano Concerto) was in brilliant form for a scintillating part. Only Serkin's page turner (BSO assistant conductor Federico Cortese) had trouble contending with a humongously unwieldy score that kept coming unglued.

Lieberson says that he was inspired by a dream in which he was "alone in a desolate mountain retreat" when the big red bird appeared "out of the black night sky . . . like a shadow without origin" and carried him off over landscapes of fire, water, and windswept earth. The four movements, reflecting these landscapes, come in waves of variations (waves of sound suggesting, for example, the flapping of great wings, a roiling fiery cauldron, or the shimmering water) -- quite followable and full of magical noises, especially the pervasive undercurrents of mysterious percussion: whispered cymbal taps, chimes, gongs, the striking of recurring high notes at the very top of the keyboard, and Everett Firth's infinitely expressive timpani. Slippery trombone slides punctuate some alluring writing for winds. A watery clarinet embodies watery surfaces (clarinettist William R. Hudgins, perhaps under the healthy influence of super-flutist Jacques Zoon, seems to be opening up, allowing himself to be more expressive and personal instead of producing merely his familiar smooth, sweetly flowing sound). At the very end, the piano fades over a disappearing rumble of percussion with a final starburst of crotales.

Lieberson writes that Red Garuda was composed "at a time when my feelings and ideas about composing were in complete upheaval and I was unsure of how to continue at all." Reading between these lines, we might also detect an even more personal story -- a divorce, a new marriage, perhaps a rescue. Although perhaps the music itself generates less "meaning" of any kind.

Ozawa let the Introduction generate more volume than Lieberson's marking ("Quietly emerging") would lead one to expect, but he also seemed aware of the fundamental architecture, the shifting plate tectonics of the score, and its textural clarity. And loud as the loudest passages may have been, they weren't as shouted as those in the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony that followed intermission -- a performance with some impressive sonic moments (those low strings!) but no musical profile except for Ozawa acting-out on the podium (if he could only channel that display of muscle-flexing choreography into the music).

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The Handel oratorio in question was Hercules, a work Emmanuel Music director Craig Smith considers one of Handel's greatest achievements. He assembled what will surely come to be regarded as a legendary cast: baritone James Maddalena in the blustery title role ("one of the most interesting stupid people in all of opera," Smith calls Hercules in his program note), countertenor Jeffrey Gall as Lichas the Herald, and the already legendary Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the central role of Dejanira, Hercules's loving but murderously jealous wife (the three of them together again for the first time since the legendary Peter Sellars/Craig Smith production of Handel's Giulio Cesare). And joining them, soprano Jayne West as Iole (Hercules's captive princess) and tenor William Hite as Hercules's son Hyllus, who falls in love with her. These wonderful performers all first came to Emmanuel at pivotal moments in their careers, and here they were returning, generously, after significant achievements in the greater musical world (Hunt Lieberson, for example, is about to make her overdue Metropolitan Opera debut in John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, on December 20). Better casting anywhere does not exist, down to the luxury of baritones Mark Risinger and Mark McSweeney, who were part of the splendid chorus, in walk-on roles. This was a landmark for everyone concerned and for music in this city.

Handel's masterly "musical drama" derives ultimately from Sophocles's Trachiniae by way of Ovid's Metamorphoses, with the librettist, the Reverend Thomas Broughton (who translated Voltaire), also quoting Shakespeare and Milton. We see a powerful character, Dejanira, who destroys the person she loves because her fevered imagination has triggered a soul-devouring jealousy. She's an Othello with a built-in Iago. Handel dramatizes this fatal flaw with flashes of "hair-raising chromaticism" (Smith's phrase) that snake through the outward formality of the arias like slender, lightning-bolt rifts in the seemingly solid ground. Smith slowed down the amazing Emmanuel Orchestra (Danielle Maddon concertmaster of an astonishing string section; the great continuo team of Shannon Snapp Natale, cello, and Suzanne Cleverdon, harpsichord; Peggy Pearson and Jane Harrison on oboes; Thomas Stephenson on bassoon; Gregory Whittaker and Paul Perfetti, trumpets; etc.) so these "harrowing harmonies" became suspended in time -- inexorable and bone-chilling.

Smith emphasized with tragic power the way these chromatic fissures appear not only in Dejanira's music but also in Hercules's. He's the self-deluded victim of an imagination so limited that he can't imagine an imagination as self-tormenting as his wife's. He's a character so full of his own sense of power, in one aria he seems to be polishing his medals with his own coloratura. In the relatively small title role, Maddalena, in his darkest, most resonant, yet phenomenally flexible voice, caught the grandeur of this limitation (it was Maddalena, remember, who created the role of Richard Nixon in Nixon in China). Hercules's great final mad scene, really less a mad scene than a scene of terrifying agony, was one of the great events of this performance.

To win Hercules back, Dejanira has innocently given him a robe with what she thinks is a magic potion to "revive the expiring flame of love." It had been offered to her by one of Hercules's dying enemies. But that robe was actually carrying a poison that boils the blood. Hercules tries to tear off the robe but his flesh comes off with it. Dejanira unintentionally fulfills her husband's enemy's posthumous revenge.

Then she goes mad. "Where shall I fly?" she asks in one of Handel's most thrilling and formally inventive set pieces. "Alas, no rest the guilty find/From the pursuing furies of the mind." Raging coloratura gives way to a horrible quietude, then returns with even more fury. Where does recitative end and aria begin? And who, having heard Hunt Lieberson's electrifying, uninhibited, yet breathtakingly gauged performance -- the flaming articulation, the wrenching nakedness of emotion (and what an emotional gamut -- from fear, to consolation, to joy, to despair, to rage and madness, to guilt and remorse), the verbal nuance, the stunning technical brilliance (the steady viola-like legato, the dazzling, ferocious coloratura), the all-encompassing size and richness and agility of her glorious voice -- who could imagine anyone ever approaching her?

Gall, too, in a more anonymous role, was in full tilt, giving his warm countertenor falsetto particular dramatic thrust and point in the narrative of Hercules's immolation. Dewy, glistening, yet spunky West and suave yet passionate Hite made an endearing and tireless (this uncut version clocked in at four hours) pair of young lovers.

And what music! Some of Handel's most extraordinary, with chorus after memorable chorus, from the droning dance that ends the first act (it wouldn't have seemed out of place in Stravinsky's Les noces) to the rushing, leaping, yet hushed will-o'-the-wisp apostrophe to Love, "the wanton god of am'rous fires" (moving as quickly as Puck putting "a girdle around the earth") to the extraordinary "Jealousy" chorus, the central communal moment in Hercules. The dramatic invocation to this "Tyrant of the human breast," with its startling key changes, was like the crying out of souls in hell. The uncanny closing phrases -- floating, fluttering, broken-up little motes of suspicion -- seemed to be coming from inside Dejanira's unstable mind.

It's Dejanira who most engaged Handel's imagination, and even besides her final mad scene, he gave her most of the best solo music: her mocking accusation of Hercules's infidelity ("Venus and her whining boy/Shall all thy wanton hours employ") -- with Hunt Lieberson and the high strings embodying the whining; or the heavenly hurt of her sublime, sinuous incantation to the night (Hercules swore the sun and moon would cease to shine if he ever proved unfaithful, so she now prays for "endless night"), Hunt Lieberson here spinning out the most poignantly ravishing lyric line. Equally astonishing are the snatches of direct dialogue in the recitative. Most of the libretto has the soloists and chorus speaking either in public or in interior monologues. So it's shocking when Dejanira accuses both Iole and later Hercules -- to their faces -- of betraying her. Handel had refused to write another opera, but even in an oratorio he couldn't escape his dramatic impulses.

Lucky us to have Smith and Hunt Lieberson and this entire team of singers and musicians here to capture those impulses, and haunt us with them for as long as any of us present will remember.