Boston Baroque / Reviews

Boston Baroque ended up hiring Soula Parassidis into the role, fresh off a different production in Athens. I do rather like Miss Harmer, so I was bracing myself for disappointment. What I got ended up blowing me away, and for all the right reasons: Parassidis gave what is perhaps one of the most electrifying performances I have ever seen at the opera house, and considering the amount of opera I have seen that is no small feat. There was literally not a single thing wrong with her performance in any way that I could see, and that is an exceptionally rare thing to see. As an actress, she sold the role: her facial expressions engaged with where she was in the story every step of the way, there was not a single hand gesture out of place (even when trembling as they were during the fourth act), and her breaths came at just the right cadence every time. Vocally, however, she was a powerhouse. Her voice had a very lovely tone, but it was almost shocking to me that her voice was able to cut through the orchestra even at the half-whisper she adopted on a few notes. And man, was it an amazing half-whisper: she was always purposeful when employing this half-whisper, and this even more than the times that Gluck asks the singer to sing loudly showed the distress of Iphigénie as a character. She also engaged with the text she was singing in ways I have never heard an opera singer connect with such text. Honestly, it was one of those performances where absolutely every note was right, from the fear she displays upon her entrance in the storm scene in the opening act, to the desperation she feels at having to sacrifice a Greek at the whims of the Scythian chief to the joy at being united with her brother Oreste. Parassidis did more than just embody Iphigénie in this performance: she made us believe in the character’s internal world through sheer force of will alone. It brings to mind something mentioned in the program about Gluck requiring extreme sensitivity and activation in performance. Something about this feels completely correct: Gluck’s music in Iphigénie en Tauride tends towards the simple, and while he has a very good sense of text painting and an unusually good sense of pace for pre-1800’s opera there is still a lot the singer needs to fill in. Parassidis met the challenge head-on: every aspect of her performance injected life into the music, and even the less dramatically interesting moments felt like the most important thing in the world. In my estimation, Parassidis gave what has to be one of my top five great opera performances that I have seen live. I do not state this lightly: this is an Iphigénie for the ages, and whenever she was off-stage I longed to see her on the stage again.

As Iphigénie, Soula Parassidis, palpably expressed the crushing anxieties of a woman who appeared to have lost everything. Salvation through death was a constant theme. Her dark soprano was complimented by subtle vocal shakes that intensified the character’s death-obsessed intensity, summed up by Iphigénie’s yearning for release from earthly tribulation in “O toi qui prolongeas mes jours.”

The score was begun just before Handel’s 66th birthday — a considerable age in the 18th century (Bach, like Handel, was born in 1685, but died the year before Jephtha was written.) His eyesight failing, the composer must have known he had only a limited time left to put pen to paper. Fate, mourning, and pain infuse the oratorio. It’s opening words, “It must be so,” are sung magnificently by the bass-baritone Dashon Burton as Zebul, “or the Ammonites, our lordly tyrants these eighteen years, will crush the race of Israel.” Much of the resulting sorrow is embedded in the words of Storgé (the mezzo-soprano Ann McMahon Quintero), part-lioness, part Iphis’s broken mother. Already, in Act 1, she has forebodings: “Some dire event hangs oe’r our heads, some woeful song we have to sing in misery extreme. O never, never was my foreboding mind distressed before with such incessant pangs.” (Little did she foresee an improbable angel coming to the rescue.) The fine soprano Ava Pine was the sweet-voiced Iphis; Randall Scotting, as her amorous Hamor, dominated the proceedings whenever he let his magnificent countertenor loose. Their impassioned Act 1 duet resonated throughout the evening, an indelible reminder that the casualty of Jephtha’s catastrophic bargain is the promise of this young couple.

I have no progeny to slay in exchange for an ideal rendition of Handel’s Jephtha, and so in Jordan Hall Friday night, Boston Baroque’s mostly competent presentation left me craving catharsis. Under music director Martin Pearlman, the period orchestra and chorus approached Handel’s final meditation on destiny, justice, and mortal toils of righteousness with more artisanal craft than artistic vision, resulting in a performance more perfunctory than profound. Countertenor Randall Scotting rang a bright and ardent, if slightly over-vibratoed, Hamor. The versatile bass-baritone Dashon Burton served honorably in Zebul’s musically and dramatically limited role, imbuing it with the moral weight of compassion, and spicing up his sonorous passages with the implausibly bright bounce of his Ns. Soprano Sonja Tengblad’s Angel glowed rosy as a Rubens cherub.