Alexander’s Feast
Irish Baroque Orchestra/Whelan
St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny
★★★★☆
This Kilkenny Arts Festival performance of Alexander’s Feast takes place close to three centuries since its Irish premiere, in February 1742. That occasion was only a few weeks ahead of the world premiere of Messiah, in the same Dublin music hall on Fishamble Street, in April that year.
Both pieces were signals of career change for Handel. He composed Alexander’s Feast in 1736, just as he was coming to accept that his gravy train of Italian operas for the London market would soon leave the station for the last time. His future success now lay with English-language texts, mostly biblical, and in composing oratorios rather than operas.
Alexander’s Feast is actually neither. It’s Handel’s setting of a John Dryden poem for the feast of St Cecilia, patron of music. And music is its theme. For although the backdrop is ancient Persepolis, where Alexander the Great is celebrating his conquest of Persia, Dryden’s real story is about how Alexander’s bard Timotheus uses music to manipulate the king’s emotions this way and that. Perfect for Handel – who retained Dryden’s subtitle, The Power of Music – and perfect for the Irish Baroque Orchestra and its director, Peter Whelan, a conductor of manifest artistic appetite and energy.
As we’ve come to expect with Whelan, these qualities are immediately to the fore with his unleashing of the work’s overture, itself full of energy and promise. His players run with every expression he communicates, so important in music with such sharp emotional contrasts from one movement to the next, all of it edged with the characteristic colours and zest of original instruments.
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The choruses – often the reflections of bystanders, as it were, on the different emotional states into which Timotheus leads Alexander – are sung not by a choir but by four singers, one to a part. Only once or twice does it feel as if the absence of a full choir means something is missing – unless that’s just my having attended 4,000 Messiahs.
Otherwise the four singers are excellent, communicating not only clear words and the relevant states of mind but also wide dynamic range and easy navigation of Handel’s intricate counterpoint.
In short, they are as effective as they are impressive, so it’s quite unfortunate that their names – Elspeth Piggott, Sarah Thursfield, Christopher Bowen and William Gaunt – do not appear in the printed programme. (It is also either oversight or poor judgment, with a work of this kind, not to provide the audience with copies of the text.)
The three soloists are well matched in colour and tone quality, as though cut from the same cloth, but with each one’s individual touch on show in how they present each new mood. The soprano Aisling Kenny, for example, brightly inhabits pride and excitement as Timotheus persuades Alexander that he belongs on Olympus among the gods, while the tenor Stuart Jackson is equally at home celebrating Bacchus and drink or urging vengeance and war. The countertenor Hugh Cutting beautifully validates Handel’s entrusting his part with the work’s tenderest and most searching moments.
Irish Baroque Orchestra perform Alexander’s Feast at the Royal Albert Hall in London, as part of BBC Proms, on Saturday, August 30th
