Ihr weisst den grossen Solomon... Solomon Andreas Scholl Solomon's Queen Inger Dam-Jensen First Harlot Alison Hagley Second Harlot Susan Bickley Queen of Sheba Susan Gritton Zadok Paul Agnew Levite Peter Harvey Conductor Paul McCreesh Gabrieli Consort and Players Composed a year after Zoroastre, Handel's Solomon might be a place to look for similar masonic themes. But beyond a certain architectural structure, it's hard to see any. There's no initiation or other rite of passage, rather an anatomy of an idealized civilization. (The organization of society by means of literary and musical genres is more remniscent of Les fetes d'Hebe, or, with its emphasis on pastoral, L'allegro.) The civilization is Anglican England, conveniently represented by Solomon's Israel with a priest-king and no popery, and its dominant mood is modified rapture. Zadok's aria, Sacred raptures fill by breast, which greets the foundation of the temple, is about as ecstatic as "Where e'er you walk", and almost as charming and elegant. The anonymous libretto might be worth a closer look. It's shot through with scriptural allusions, but they're all turned upside down to make a nicer world. Instead of "all is vanity", this Solomon says: "Did I not own Jehovah's power, vain were all I knew". The performance by the Gabrieli Consort took a while to get going. Because it lacks drama and celebrates the joys of moderation, Solomon needs something extra in the way of understanding from the performers. It didn't really get it until the second act, when the harlots finally introduce some emotion. The psalm-like choruses at the end of act II and III took off, and the choral sections of the masque were well contrasted. The lack of oomph wasn't a problem with Andreas Scholl as Solomon, however. He was appropriately serene, with an incredibly pure tone. His English diction is still slightly shaky (George II, fine), but his singing is to the Handelian manner born. The line "whose gracious pow'r relieved thy slaves distress'd" is set like an Anglican response, and he made it sound exactly right. Inger Dam-Jensen, unfortunately, wasn't quite so right as Solomon's queen. AS with Anna-Caterina Antonacci in Rodelinda (though less exposedly so), her voice and technique belong in a different repertoire. She has a husky middle register, and a delicate coloratura top that didn't project well (to where I was) in the Albert Hall. She looked very stylish, and it was a nice touch having a Scandinavian as Solomon's Egyptian queen. She loves him for his wisdom, and he seems to have ditched his other 999 wives, so she must have something. The rest of the cast were stalwart Handelians. Susan Bickley was suitably mean as the second harlot, and Alison Hagley almost chaste as the first harlot, who turns into an everywoman figure to celebrate the happiness of the ordinary people at the end of the act. Susan Gritton was an utterly English queen of Sheba. (She loves him for his wisdom too.) Paul Agnew as Zadok sounded lovely as usual, holding the explicitly religious side of the music together authoritatively.. Solomon is difficult to get over, perhaps especially to an audience that would quite like the Hallelujah Chorus. This performance, while always pleasant, didn't quite do it for me. But some of the music is irrestistable. --------------------------------- Gerald McBurney's new work, Letter to Paradise, performed on 28 July by Tigran Matrossian with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Mark Wigglesworth, could have been a pastiche of Tatyana's letter scene in Onegin, but it turned out to be much more interesting and evocative of less idealized and more realistic emotions. It's a setting for bass of a letter by the Russian avant-garde poet Daniil Kharms to a woman called Raisa, the diminutive of whose name in its oblique form can also be the word for paradise. The letter is in one sense a literary one, since it has a sophisticated structure -- it is a letter about sitting up all night not writing a letter, and other failures of communication which focus on the image of the window, both a channel for contact and a barrier. It also contains a lot of fascinating wordplay (enough to make me wish my Russian was a lot better), for example, contrasting the name Raia with words including the syllable rass-, especially the stem meaning "separation", with the additional sense of religious schism, and the rasskaz, "story". But the letter survived Kharms' death only because his wife and a friend preserved all of his papers after his murder in 1941 -- we have it as if it were a private letter. The setting seems to reproduce speech with a few heightened moments, for example, emphatically repeated syllables in the signature at the end. The orchestral part provides an emotional, semi-mimetic commentary, introducing industrial sounds as the singer realizes that he has been awake all night and written nothing. The final section is called a Fugue, but in the sense that the singer moves away from his focus on Raisa to an awareness that his communication with her has failed completely. Tigran Matrossian has a fluid, attractive, if monochrome, dark brown voice. I think another singer could have brought out more of the irony of the text and music. But he delivered the essential feeling effectively.