Singers are inherently interesting, I suppose, and the talk has been mainly
about Bejun Mehta's last-minute substitution for David Daniels. But the
counter-tenor wasn't really the main event in this superb evening of
seventeenth-century Italian chamber music. The Arcadian Academy, Elizabeth
Blumenstock, Lisa Weiss (violins), Phoebe Carrai (cello), and David Tayler
(lute), all members of Nicholas McGegan's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra,
delivered the diverse programme in style.

The performance began with a manic bravura bergamesque by Uccellini and an
expressively singing dialogue for violins by Salamone Rossi. The big fellas
showed why they were big: Corelli's Ciaconna detta La Virginia was pure
pleasure, and a suite by Nicola Mattei, based in England for most of his
slightly dodgy life, had echoes of Purcell and a punchy selection of styles
and forms that looked forward to Rameau.

Bejun's substitution of three Handel arias for one of the Scarlatti
cantatas ruptured the time frame, but actually made a sort of sense by
highlighting Handel's profound debt to Italian instrumental composition,
especially Corelli. It was a well considered selection as well, two heroic
arias (Up the dreadful steep ascending, from Jephtha, and Empio, diro, from
Giulio Cesare) with Verdi prati in between. Mehta showed a wonderful grasp
of the form of the arias, the way Handel makes the voice into an
instrument, using the techniques that Corelli and Mattei use to make the
instrument into a voice, and achieving a near perfect combination of form
and expressiveness.

The surviving cantata, Perche tacete, regolati concenti, is explicitly a
kind of dramatic symphony, with the voice as the solo instrument in a
sequence of short  movements. The text is a commonplace meditation on the
pleasures and pains of love, with the usual imagery of music and war thrown
in. The whole thing is addressed to a beloved who ignores it, and provides
the opportunity for a self-absorbed virtuoso performance, which again Mehta
delivered, contrasting anger and despair and ending in masochistic
resignation. He even gave an "ah" of contentment as he finished.

Mehta probably got lucky by being available for this tour, because
McGegan's dramatic and technical understanding of this music seems to suit
him perfectly. He was obviously more at home in Handel than Scarlatti,
which he has only just learned, but he can do the music -- the notes, the
drama, the lyricism -- wonderfully in both.

Mehta looks a little bit like the young James Bowman, and his precision and
exuberance are also somewhat similar. His voice is close to the traditional
Anglican sound, very unlike David Daniels', but he produces it far more
easily than anyone except perhaps Michael Chance, and (perhaps a
generational thing) he's got far more natural expressiveness and sense of
drama than Chance.

The high point of Mehta's performance was probably Verdi prati
(mysteriously missing from Daniels' Handel CD). Apart from maybe Scherza
infida, this is the richest and most allusive of all Handel's opera arias.
Mehta's singing really made me think about it again. It sits at the centre
of concentric circles of illusion, disillusion and loss in a way which is
almost unstagable. Rinaldo finally realises that he can't incorporate
Bradamante into the dreamworld of Alcina's island, that she's come to take
him away, to marriage, to his heroic career but also (he dimly realises) to
death. As the realisation sinks in, instead of longing for his home and
real life, he mourns the illusory world he is about to lose, trying to
explain his loss as part of the cycle of nature, but returning to the
finality of the destruction of Alcina's artifice. The effect is ironic and
prematurely romantic at the same time -- Rinaldo really doesn't know what
he is losing -- in one of Handel's most understated but expressive
settings. Mehta got the tone of melancholy, with something much more
profound behind it, perfectly, with pianissimo's to raise the hair on the
back of the neck.

There were some noises off during the concert, but there were plenty of
fireworks indoors tonight as well.