The eighth annual Handel Week Festival opened in Oak Park, Feb. 17, at Grace Episcopal Church. Under the artistic direction of Dr. Dennis Northway, “The Grand Handel” revealed this revered Baroque composer in all of his versatility-from the practical recycler of previously written music to the daring expressionist, eschewing conventional formulas.
A nicely balanced program last Saturday featured concerti grossi and a motet and cantata for soprano solo. With his enduring acclaim as the composer of English oratorios such as Messiah, Handel has long been forgotten as an equally sure craftsman in Baroque idioms largely associated with other composers.
One need only say “Baroque concerto” and the name Vivaldi springs to mind with the wag’s comment that having heard one of Vivaldi’s concertos amounts to having heard all of the more than 500. But few people can say they have heard even one of Handel’s approximately 20 concertos, and herein lies the calling of Handel Week: to bring lost and dusty, yet worthwhile, scores to life.
Conducting from the harpsichord with the occasional surreptitious glance toward the orchestra, Northway led a small but vigorous ensemble through a parade of tempos and moods in the 10 movements of two concertos. The C Minor Concerto, Opus 6, No. 8 featured violinists Thomas Yang and Jeri-Lou Zike in so many virtuosic solo passages that each took a well-deserved bow. Although the influence of Italian composers in these works is unmistakable, Handel imbued this strictly instrumental writing with his palpable sense of drama.
For lovers of Handel’s three long, worn-out Water Music suites, the Opus 6 concertos provide a similar pleasure but with fresh music. Listening to these concertos was an invitation to imagination-a procession here, a magical summer reverie there, a lost love, a storm, a chase. The intrusion of an airplane overhead was, however, not an illusion, and left the audience hanging on a half-cadence until Northway gave the all-clear signal.
Although two other baroque giants, Bach and Telemann, win the prize for turning out cantatas by the hundreds, Handel, in shorter works relatively unknown today, held his own as a sensitive and imaginative creator of vocal scores. Chalk it up to years of soaking in the ambiance of Rome, Florence, and Venice. Handel deftly transmuted the overdone and sometimes insufferably repetitive singing on Italian stages into refined solo writing for the concert hall-without sacrificing an ounce of dramatic persuasion.
In “Cruel Tyrant Love,” soprano Sarah Gartshore, a five-year veteran of the Handel Week Festival, did the yeoman’s job, churning out measure upon measure of vocal acrobatics above the supporting orchestra. With her naturally rich voice, Gartshore evoked a defiant mood as a scorned lover, delivering melismas and cadenzas with an authentically gutsy bravura, like the kind that dazzled audiences in Handel’s day.
Gartshore had the power to still tempestuos winds (and violins) with the command “Silence!” which was humbly obeyed by the orchestra in the opening of the motet “Winds be Silent.” All aglitter with tasteful sequins and glistening eyes, she seemed to shine most in the upper range, in which she brilliantly called the winds back to life with the celestial “Alleluia” of the closing cadenza.