This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and will be repeated at
1.00 on Saturday. Well worth hearing then if you missed it today.

The programme was powerful and very well balanced, if perhaps a bit intense
for lunchtime: two Handel arias, Scherza infida and As with rosy steps,
Mahler's Ruekert Lieder, two Rilke songs by Peter Lieberson, and
Trirasksha's aria from Lieberson's Ashoka's Dream.

Scherza infida is long, slow and complex, a detailed expression of sexual
jealousy and despair. It must be a killer to start with, though there
wasn't another obvious place for it on this programme. Ann Murray began a
recital with it a couple of years ago and delivered such a pessimistic,
introspective performance that the audience was too miserable (or
unimpressed) to applaud. Hunt made it into a real Sturm und Drang scene,
helped by Vignoles, whose energetic, romantic-style accompaniment
co-operated with her fluid approach to the rhythm and her dramatic
gestures. One small oddity was that she seemed to be frozen from waist to
neck, and stiff-armed, which is realistic for somebody who is totally
consumed with grief, but less expressive in performance than it might be
and probably not terribly good for the singing.

As with rosy steps must be Hunt's trademark aria, recalling her UK debut
and breakthrough in the Glyndebourne Theodora in 1996. It's a good move to
put it after Scherza infida. On its own it has a conventional,
sanctimonious religious quality, but in the context of extreme emotional
turbulence -- in Theodora, the news that the Christians are about to be
arrested and killed, with the implicit threat of rape which will later
become explicit -- it offers a literal ecstasy, a release into the world of
the spirit. (The same development from profound, disturbed fear to ecstasy
happens with Theodora's arias in act 2 and New scenes of joy in act 3. This
insight alone, BTW, justifies Sellars' production.) Hunt's performance
today was, well, ecstatic but outward directed -- truly operatic.

Hunt's expressive power, and Vignoles' romantic expertise, are more
naturally at home in Mahler's Ruekert Lieder, but their performance seemed
understated by contrast with the Handel. I suppose this could be because
the performance of the Mahler is in many ways more determined, by the
detail of the music and the text -- the performers do not have the chance
to add value as they do with Handel. Hunt certainly delivered the detail
and the overall shape of the songs superbly, finding a transcendence not so
far from As with rosy steps in the ends of Um Mittenacht and Ich bin der
Welt abhanden gekommen.

Peter Lieberson's Rilke songs formed an effective contrast with the Mahler.
Their allusive, getting on for symbolist, lyrics and "modern classical"
settings allowed Hunt to open them up in her performance, although they
share the main themes of time, space and nature, and the nature of poetry
and music themselves, with the Mahler settings.

Hunt's German seems to have improved since her Albert Hall performance in
the summer. Maybe she had more of a chance to calibrate her pronunciation
in Wiggy's refined vaulted shoebox.

Ending with Triraksha's aria, also by Lieberson, but in a much more
operatic vein, was a masterstroke. In this aria from Ashoka's Dream,
Trirasksha, married to the emperor Ashoka, expresses her fear at his
conversion from violent pragmatism to mercy, and its consequences for her
son (who is presumably now vulnerable to the machinations of the enemies
Ashoka would formerly have eliminated). Like Scherza infida, it depicts the
loss of certainty into a hallucinatory despair, which Hunt delivered with
comparable intensity and drama. Not an upbeat ending, but an amazingly
powerful one.

The encores were Deep river and a Brahms Lied. The audience loved every
moment, including, maybe especially, those who hadn't heard her before.