Early Music

Samson, an oratorio

Pacific MusicWorks

Samson, an oratorio by George Frederick Handel

Libretto by Newburgh Hamilton, based on John Milton’s Samson Agonistes

First Baptist Church, Seattle

May 4, 2019

We’re living in difficult times. Tweets and insults triumph over the kind of thought that matches the complexity of our problems. A disturbing number of leaders in Washington are sly, vicious, or both. Beloved institutions meant to protect the people are undermined by those meant to “support and defend” the Constitution. Collectively we are forced to commit crimes that appall us: we force Mexican children from their parents and incarcerate them in soulless desert buildings; we open floodgates of opportunity to foreign governments who mean us harm; we dismantle laws forged over time to defend our fragile earth and beloved public spaces. We allow the proliferation of guns and tolerate school shootings. Education, medical care, and opportunity are increasingly restricted to a wealthy white minority. And that’s the short summary—the pages of this newspaper have documented at length the threats and violence to our readership, including women, LGBTQ communities, and people of color.

Into this desperate moment steps none other than John Milton (1608-1674) the great English poet who used his brilliant gifts to defend human freedom and to fight a form of government—inherited monarchy—that he believed to be as corrupt as the one we are struggling with now. He didn’t carry placards or chain himself to the fence of Buckingham Palace. He wrote poems in an age when poetry was the Internet of its day. He also wrote polemics for freedom of the press, divorce, and free expression when the King and then Cromwell’s parliament attempted to control liberal forces among the populace.

Now, as in Milton’s time, “the pen is mightier than the sword” and valiant writers—journalists, poets, lyricists, novelists, dramatists, film writers and performers of all kinds—are raising their voices to protest the erosion of civility and justice in this dangerous era. But in addition to new works, this is the right time for us to turn to masters of the past who remind us how to fight the good fight for human rights. The human race has been here before—we know how to combat powers that would throw us backward into darker times. PacificMusicWorks, by bringing to the stage G.F. Handel’s oratorio Samson— based on Milton’s great poem Samson Agonistes—has used its brilliant musical forces to present a work that, in addition to being a sublime musical experience, speaks directly to our condition.

It is the biblical story of the Israelite warrior Samson, blinded and enslaved by his enemies, the Philistines, because he foolishly, destructively, revealed to the spy Delilah that the secret of his dominating power was his hair—which she then cut. As Samson struggles with his own stupidity and loss of vision—literally blinded, but also duped, discouraged, and helpless—a chorus of family, friends, and enemies come to condole or ridicule Samson’s reduced condition. As he exchanges arguments with these various voices, we see Samson reevaluate his position and slowly regain hope and power. He doesn’t reveal his regained strength when led to the temple where the pagan god Dagon is being celebrated, and so pulls the whole temple down on the heads of the Philistines, sacrificing himself in the process. He conquers despair, fear, and blindness so that he can save his people.

What seems so timely about this story, and its lively, compelling presentation in Handel’s oratorio, is how Samson moves from paralyzing anguish to enlightened agency. In an Act I aria, “Total eclipse!” Samson bemoans his loss of “glorious light” and asks (in the poem—in the oratorio the friend Micah is given the question) why light is confined to the “tender eyes,” a site so vulnerable that it would have made more sense if the Creator had enabled the perception of light “through all parts diffus’d, that we might look at will through every pore.” Since light is the extended metaphor for wisdom, the loss of it is a double tragedy. In a careless, boastful moment Samson screwed himself and got his fellow Israelites into a devastating mess, giving primacy to the pleasure-loving worshipers of Dagon. The question of the poem and the oratorio is “How do you get yourself and your people out of a mess so great it seems almost impossible to overcome? How do you forgive yourself and move forward?” Good question for 2020.

Samson, at first, blames God—not an unusual move when looking for relief. “Why does the God of Israel sleep?” he asks. “Arise with dreadful sound, and clouds encompassed round!” I can relate to this—I’ve fantasized about the Second Coming. Wouldn’t Trump and his gang of thieves be gob-smacked if the Sistine Chapel came to life and threw them all into the lower depths? “In whirlwinds them pursue,” Samson sings, “The tempest of Thy wrath now raise,/Full fraught with vengeance due, /Till shame and trouble all thy foes shall seize!” The problem with this solution is that Samson thinks God’s action is separate from his own. It’s someone else’s job to set things straight—not mine. Samson feels so guilty he thinks his only recourse is to die, “…to expiate my crime, why should I live?”

Death, of course, is not the solution. The narrative turns in Act II, when Samson is distracted from his doomsday thoughts by Delilah, who comes to seduce Samson all over again—to offer to take care of him in his distress since “Life is not lost, though lost your sight/Let other senses taste delight.” But Samson doesn’t fall for her “warbling charms” and gets so angry that he sends her away and offers to fight his next visitor, the tormenting giant Harapha. Samson feels that his strength is still in his body, “returning with my hair.” By rejecting the false love of Delilah and threatening the giant who mocks him, Samson recognizes that strength is a renewable commodity, like hair. He starts to see himself as the agent of change—still a warrior who can defend his people.

Milton’s poem, like Handel’s oratorio, observes the Aristotelian unities of time (action within 24 hours), place (one location), and action (one dramatic problem). Thus in Act III, when Samson exacts revenge on the Philistines by pulling down the temple, we hear chaos in the orchestra as messengers run in to describe what happened. By today’s narrative standards Milton left the exciting part out—but the beauty of the unities is that they avoid the showy drama for a laser-like focus on the real topic: how do you turn things around, redeem a terrible mistake, overcome wickedness and return the world to forward movement? No sooner is Samson’s body brought back in a funeral cortege, and tributes paid—“Samson like Samson fell/Both life and death heroic”—than the most famous aria of the work is sung by the soprano Israelite Woman, “Let the bright seraphim.” It calls upon the angels to “Let their celestial concerts all unite/Ever to sound his praise in endless blaze of light.” Blind no more, Samson has enlightened his world by taking his strength back and recovering light for his people.

PacificMusic Works’ renowned director, Stephen Stubbs, has once again marshaled a talented cast of singers, bringing back the gifted tenor Aaron Sheehan— who sang a memorable Orphée for PMW in 2015—to sing the demanding role of Samson. It’s such a baroque thing to have the brawny hero a tenor instead of a hearty baritone or bass—but in the 18^th century the heroic voices of opera were the high voices. Sheehan stood up to the demands of the role with stamina and verve. It is usually sung by a heroic tenor—I first saw this work performed by Jon Vickers at the Met in 1986—so it’s surprising that Sheehan can sing a high tenor role like Gluck’s Orphée, and yet bring the necessary power to the deeper, heavier tones of Samson. Bravo!

Equal bravos go to the expressive characters surrounding Samson, especially the counter-tenor Reginald L. Mobley whose flawless contralto never fails to amaze. Most male altos show some sign of a passagio, or have the piping tones of a choirboy, but Mobley has a round, powerfully smooth voice all up and down the range. Jonathan Woody’s Harapha was wonderfully dramatic, and Tess Altiveros was suitably cooing and seductive as Delilah, getting the only laugh of the evening when she stomped off stage with her nose in the air when Samson refused to fall for her seductions. The wonderful chorus—nineteen singers under the direction of Chorus Master Dr. Geoffrey Boers—navigated the lively Jehovah/Great Dagon choral fugue in a way that demonstrated the doubleness of Philistines vs Israelites with real excitement. They were terrific throughout.

As ever, the PacificMusicWorks Orchestra, conducted by Stephen Stubbs with concertmaster Tekla Cunningham, challenges the capacity of language to express its perfection and visual drama. It’s hard to believe anyone in the Seattle area can put down their money—the equivalent of six lattes—and see this brilliant orchestra embroider sound with a delicacy and excitement that rivals the finest orchestras in the world. Watching the orchestra create Handel’s full range of emotions, seeing the bows rise and fall, hearing the twice-looped, keyless trumpets blare out, and the harpsichord silver the air, the baroque guitar thrum—there’s nothing like it. I know I keep saying this, but you have to see baroque music to understand how wonderful it is.

I have just one little complaint. The librettist of this 1743 re-telling of Milton’s 1671 poem, Newburgh Hamilton, is given sole credit for the words, though his real gift was selecting key passages from Milton and distributing them into several voices. A comparison of the libretto to the poem shows how well this job was done, so I don’t begrudge Hamilton his credit—but the genius here is Milton, whose name should surely have been in the credits.

Milton is thought by many (myself included) to be the greatest poet in the English language—surely equal with Shakespeare but never yet exceeded. He and the Bard are equals in their mastery of the language—its music and rhythms, Shakespeare is more wide-ranging in his interests. But Milton—who thought of himself as a poet-priest because, in his blindness, he believed the Holy Spirit dictated his poems to him in his sleep—conveys a sense of the world beyond the world, a vast and fundamentally benign universe available to those who overcome despair and take agency in creation. That’s why this oratorio is a wonderful message to Americans in this dark political moment of aggressive cruelty and selfishness in high places. We can remain blind, depressed, despairing, waiting for some god or other force to do something, or we can notice the power renewing itself in us and take agency.

The message of Samson is hope—not just sacrificial hope, but analytical hope in the face of a wickedness that we somehow, through our own blindness, brought down on ourselves. (I know…I didn’t vote for him either…but somehow we didn’t work hard enough to prevent this disaster, and now we have to pull ourselves together and fix it). Each of us has a gift that can be used in defense of human rights and dignity. PacificMusicWorks has gifts in such abundance that you leave the concert knowing that light will always conquer darkness.

Roman Holiday: Young Handel’s Italian Adventures

By Sharon Cumberland

Pacific MusicWorks

Roman Holiday: Young Handel’s Italian Adventures

St. Stephens Episcopal Church

May 12, 2018

Review by Sharon Cumberland

See review in Seattle Gay News

An evening with Stephen Stubbs and the terrific performers of Pacific MusicWorks always gives you more than you could have expected or hoped for. This imaginative program—“Roman Holiday: Young Handel’s Italian Adventures”—not only gave the audience a wonderful evening of music, but it educated the listener in Handel’s early influences, his germinating ideas, the influence of the Roman Arcadian Academy on the development of baroque opera and oratorio, and, as always, a visual education on how baroque music looks as well as sounds. On this occasion, in addition to the always-fascinating sight of great performers playing their instruments, soprano Amanda Forsythe enacted Handel’s cantata heroines in all their tragic beauty.

It was a great way to spend mothers Mother’s Day, watching a small group of six virtuosi—two violins, a baroque harp, a baroque cello, a harpsichord and Conductor Stubb’s baroque guitar and lute—create a world of intense drama using George Frederick Handel’s earliest vocal works. The effects were thrilling to say the least. Ms. Forsythe sang four demanding cantatas based on ancient narratives of Roman queens and pastoral nymphs: Agrippina, condemned to death by her own son, Nero; a nameless pastoral figure mourning the departure of Clori, a lovely nymph; and two cantatas of a jilted lovers: Clori (perhaps the same character as in the earlier episode) who is jilted by her lover Fileno, and the lament of the forsaken Armida, who mourns the loss of her retreating warrior even as his footsteps fade in the background. Ms. Forsythe portrayed each of these voices with individualized characterizations, moving through despair, rage, confusion, mourning, and resignation with precise and touching fidelity to the dramatic narrative as well as to the music.

Ms. Forsythe was also very much in tune with the baroque aesthetic that calls on the singer to have a pleasing facial expression even while singing about anger or despair. According to this aesthetic, the mouth shouldn’t be opened too widely or the features distorted beyond the enactment of emotion. Baroque singing, with all its trills and melismas, is sometimes weird to watch if the singer has to contort his or her face to achieve the demands of this very complex music, so I was impressed that Ms. Forsythe maintained a countenance that was always composed, even during the longest and most challenging passages. And, it must be said, Ms. Forsythe is a beautiful woman who wore gorgeous gowns that perfectly evoked the dramatic moments she embodied. In the first half of the program she wore a kind of marbled silk that appeared at once ancient and modern, and in the second half of the program she wore a cascading chiffon gown that made her sparkling bodice appear as though she were emerging from the ocean. (I think her designer needs a program credit).

Each half of the program also featured a sonata—the first by Corelli, who was one of young Handel’s greatest influences, and the second by Handel in his playful Roman stage, showing how his early work was influenced by the masters, and how his own masterworks were anticipated by his youthful products. It’s a joy to watch Conductor Stubbs and his players—including the incomparable pair of violinists Tekla Cunningham and Ingrid Matthews—as they entwine, chase, and unfold their musical voices in the beautifully structured world of Handel and Corelli. It’s like watching choreography as one player after another constructs the waves of form that build up like filigree and then undo themselves like waves crashing on a beach. They even sway back and forth like sea creatures in waves of music.

It looks like so much fun—and gives a strong sense of people living happy and exciting lives, both the composers and the players, from the eighteenth century to the present. Pacific MusicWorks’ basso continuo—Henry Lebedinsky’s harpsichord, Elisabeth Reed’s cello, and Conductor Stubb’s lute and guitar—provided the solid foundation and varied texture of support that makes baroque music so interesting. You can go to a Beethoven or Brahms concert and hear different interpretations of musical text, but you’ll always hear the same text. Baroque music allows for so much improvisation and variation that a musical piece—no matter how familiar—is never the same text twice. Baroque ensembles are known for how well they manage this wide-open world of choices, and Pacific MusicWorks is justly famous for how inventively musical and how faithfully true to the eighteenth-century spirit they present their musical inventions. Stephen Stubbs is a famous baroque scholar who can transform a piece of music, as he does with one of the arias presented, “Col partir la bella Clori”, by composing additional parts for violins to accentuate the genre of music and the mood of the lyrics.

This was the final concert of the 2017-2018 season, but Pacific MusicWorks’ 2018-2019 season is on the way, starting in October with Monteverdi Masterworks and continuing through an exciting year of baroque orchestral and vocal music, offering Handel’s thrilling oratorio, Samson, for its operatic performance of the season. If you’ve never seen this fabulous group, take the time now to look over their offerings for next year. You’re in for an unusual and exciting treat.

Christmas in Rome

By Sharon Cumberland

Pacific MusicWorks

Christmas in Rome

Epiphany Parish of Seattle

December 7, 2018

Review by Sharon Cumberland

See review in Seattle Gay News

The Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus has generated a huge catalog of wonderful music, much of it from the Baroque period (1600-1750). And who better to present some of these familiar and rediscovered classics than Pacific MusicWorks, in what better location than the beautiful Epiphany Parish of Seattle in Madrona? The audience for this sold-out performance filled every pew in the long nave, spilling upward into the choir loft—the ideal place to watch PMW’s 12-person orchestra and five singers as they built the elaborate structures of baroque cantatas and concerti grossi.

The “Christmas in Rome” program turned to the eternal city for its sources, showcasing music composed for elaborate musical celebrations in the headquarters of Christianity. The first half of the evening consisted of two concerti for the twelve-person orchestra—Archangelo Corelli’s famous Concerto Grosso “Fatto per la Notte di Natale” and George Fredrick Handel’s charming Concerto Grosso Op. 6 #5—as well Marco Marazzolli’s short cantata, ”Con Fausto augurio” for two sopranos and a tenor (two angels and a shepherd). The second half of the evening was devoted to Alessandro Stradella’s cantata “Ah, troppo é ver,” in which Lucifer and a chorus of Furies bemoan the coming of Christ into the world, while angels, shepherds, and St. Joseph rejoice.

Baroque musicians are often scholars and researchers, since quantities of music of this period still sit untranscribed in libraries all over the world. Both the Corelli and the Handel concerti are well-known favorites—baroque popular hits always welcome in concerts—but the Marazzolli cantata is a work brought to light by the Director/musicologist Stephen Stubbs, who discovered “”Con Fausto augurio” (“With propitious augurs” or less literally, “”With good-luck signs”) in a collection of unedited cantatas from the 17^th century. The work was first discovered and transcribed by hand in the 1990s by fellow lutenist and musicologist Paul O’Dette, who provided the score that Stubbs then rendered into a modern edition using the transcription program Sibelius. Seattle audiences are, most likely, the first to hear this beautiful mini-drama of two soprano angels announcing the birth of Christ to one startled and very articulate shepherd. Together they awaken the other shepherds who then rush to the manger to see the child come into the world. But, in the final lyrics of the cantata, the angels and shepherd sing that “If the feet are too late/Ah, with the wings of faith/Let the heart fly to him.” In the devout 17^th century as in the present time, we can only know the miracle of Christmas through faith—and, I will add, through recovered treasures like this one.

The second half of the program was Stradella’s cantata “Ah, troppo é ver” (Lucifer’s complaint that “Ah, it’s too true” that God is sending his son into the world to thwart satanic plans), a thirty-minute drama that opens with the devil and ends with St. Joseph and a heavenly choir. Director Stubbs, in his program notes, points out that Stradella was the first to combine the virtues of the concerto grosso with the cantata, creating a form that ultimately led to opera as we know it. Hearing and seeing this short proto-opera connects the dots between choral church music, secular singing for entertainment, and religious and secular orchestral music.

Certainly the opening is pure operatic drama, in which Lucifer (the awe-inspiring bass Douglas Williams) delivers an impassioned condemnation of God’s tyranny, and calls upon the Furies to wreak war and vengeance on Heaven. It brings to mind the Satanic monologues in operas such as Boito’s Mefistofele and Belioz’ La Damnation de Faust (one wonders if those composers knew Stradella’s cantata). The Furies—singers who later perform angels and saints—step forward and agree, in crackling “fury” voices, to “launch their thunderbolts” on the “horrible orders/Of the king of the underworld.” The dark forces leave the story at this stage, which is continued with an Angel aria in which the shepherds are awakened with the good news of a heavenly child. These shepherds are even more articulate than Marazzolli’s, agreeing to hasten to “where fate has transubstantiated Heaven into a humble manger.” It seems appropriate that these “pastori” are the voice of the librettist, Cardinal Giulio Riospigliosi, a poet-priest who places theology in the mouths of shepherds, and simplicity and acceptance into the mouths of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph.

I was impressed that St. Joseph’s aria—the noble acceptance of his son’s “prodigious destiny”—was written for a castrato whose soprano range, in Stradella’s time, was considered the heroic voice while the deep basso was reserved for evil or comic characters. It seems the opposite to us today, probably because there are (happily) no more castrati, and the development of male falsettists capable of singing castrato roles has been fairly recent in music history. Nathan Medley sang this role with translucent dignity.

I was sitting in the balcony so that I could watch the players, and saw that this performance was being videoed—and I hope it will be available to the public someday. Yet no recording can convey the powerful effect of watching a group of gifted musicians create this exciting, multi-textured music—especially Corelli’s concerto grosso “made for Christmas night.” On a recording, the melodies that are developed through repetitions and variations sound solid, as though a leading voice is accompanied by an array of harmonizing supporters. But if you are fortunate to see the work being played, you realize that what sounds like an unspooling line of music is more like a series of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth among players in a manner that is both visually and aurally exciting. PMW’s violin and viola players always stand while performing orchestral pieces, so that you see how music involves the whole body—the string section moving like branches in a breeze, alternately gentle and intense. It’s a pleasure to see music created as the original pre-recording audiences saw it—watching players conduct each other with glances, turnings, and nods. You see the intimate relationship among individuals that creates an inclusive musical environment for the audience. It’s a thrilling dimension of live performance that can’t be duplicated on any electronic medium.

No tribute to this extraordinary orchestra is enough to convey their expertise and devotion to music. It’s always a joy and a privilege to see Pacific MusicWorks in action. And you can see them for free in their lunchtime program called Sanctuary in the City on the first Wednesdays of the month at the Josephinum downtown (2^nd Ave at Stewart St.) from 12:10-12:50. On January 2^nd it will be Music for Church and Cello. The PMW Underground program that moves from brewery to brewery also brings great music to where the people are. The next program, Corelli Goes Global, as well as the schedule for PNW’s next full presentation, Leading Ladies (women composers in a male-dominated world) can be found at PacificMusicWorks.org.