Brooklyn. (North America).(Siroe)(Opera Review)

Only recently awakened from a two-and-a-half-century nap, Handel's Siroe has now had a professional staging in America. Jorge Lavelli's 2000 Venice production came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for four performances in April, aptly housed amid the stylishly distressed columns and amphitheater seating of the Harvey Theatre. Andrea Marcon conducted his period-instrument Venice Baroque Orchestra, and listeners left wondering how the beautiful 1727 score could possibly have escaped attention for so long.

Lavelli and designer Alain Lagarde put the orchestra at center stage. Nearly all of the action took place in a semicircle on the same level as the audience. Indeed, the singers sometimes directly addressed the first row of spectators, who were not all receptive, and Laodice (Simone Kermes) sang her first aria from the sixth row. Lavelli traded on the humanity of the singers, who were perforating extremely difficult music at close range, to add even more life in the archetypal Metastasian characters already enlivened by Handel's music. Moreover, the principals sometimes graphically sought consolation in the music. During Siroe's "La sorte mia tiranna," when the drama first turns dark in betrayal, conductor Marcon left the podium to lend him a sympathetic arm. Laodice sang "Mi lagnero tacendo" while wandering among the cellos for the da capo. Since the scenery consisted of five chairs (with a brief appearance by a table), human interaction was primary, and it was on the whole a brilliant reflection of Handle's score. There were two small miscalculations. Medarse's aria of triumph through treachery, "Fra l'orror della tempesta," does not work as comic relief, though this choice may have had to do with the musical and dramatic capabilities of countertenor Roberto Balconi. And Siroe's great declaration of love ("Eccomi tutto amor"), the still center of the evening, was instead hurled as a challenge. But ...