FROM AROUND THE WORLD: HALLE.(Rodrigo; Tamerlano; Cora)(Review)

The Handel Festival in Halle, once regarded as the upstart East German rival of the venerable Gottingen Handel Festival, is now fifty years old. It celebrated the occasion by pulling in as many leaders of the early-music movement as it could lay its hands on, which turned out to be quite a few. Trevor Pinnock, Jean-Claude Malgoire, John Eliot Gardiner, Rene Jacobs, Alan Curtis and even Gottingen's artistic director, Nicholas McGegan, were among the conductors for the ten-day event in June. Offerings included two new Handel opera stagings, two other opera productions and many concerts. The new Handel productions contrasted Tamerlano, one of the composer's best-known operas, with the seldom-heard Rodrigo, a product of his early years in Italy and his second surviving opera. American audiences witnessed Jonathan Miller's previous staging of Tamerlano in 1995 at Glimmerglass Opera. His new effort, seen in the exquisite Goethe-Theater in Bad Lauchstadt on June 10, is a co-production with the Theatre des Champs-Elysees and Sadler's Wells Theatre; a recording is scheduled, as well. As at Glimmerglass, Miller used gesture and decor sparingly -- indeed, the program credited no one for the sets, which consisted simply of a couple of metallic gold oriental screens and a black bench. But Judy Levin's richly-colored costumes, with details neatly indicating the geographical provenance of the respective characters, supplied considerable opulence. While German critics complained that Miller didn't do anything with the opera, for many that was the source of the production's appeal, though it would be more accurate to say that Miller strove thoughtfully to match the Affekt, or emotion, of each aria with appropriate, economical movement. He at least gave the illusion of approximating what Handel might have had in mind, and a welcome illusion it was, though an intrusive interval in the midst of Act II robbed the climactic throne-room scene of its cumulative force.

The Ottoman emperor Bajazet, imprisoned by the Tatar warlord Tamerlano, is one of Handel's most movingly tragic figures, and Thomas Randle conveyed all his pent-up rage, suppressing the full power of his tenor but for a few compelling outbursts. Monica Bacelli's surprisingly lightweight Tamerlano failed to supply the necessary counterbalance, but Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz sang Asteria, Bajazet's daughter, with lovely, resonant tones. Countertenor Graham Pushee contributed a musicianly, appealingly sung Andronico, Anna Bonitatibus an assertive Irene and Antonio Abete a sonorous Leone. Trevor Pinnock, leading the English Concert, did not go out of his way to reveal the opera's emotional power, but it came through potently nonetheless.

Where Miller's decision to trust Handel's stagecraft in Tamerlano was a sound one, the youthful Rodrigo, first heard in Florence in 1707, could stand the benefit of a strong directorial hand. Instead, this opera about Spain's last Visigoth ruler, who wrested the throne from a tyrant only to become an even greater tyrant himself, became a hyperactive romp in the hands of director Axel Kohler. He sought humor at every turn, and where he didn't find it, he ladled it on anyway, while Heinz Balthes's cutout-style sets bolstered the flippant ...