Handel’s Agrippina at the Met – an unforgettable performance

Joyce DiDinato IS Agrippina. The American mezzo soprano bores full beam at the audience, hurtling, unstoppable, down the tunnel of an obsession to have her cokehead son, Nerone, installed as Emperor of Rome. From the moment she sashays onstage in a sassy, figure-hugging cocktail dress, the relentlessness of her purpose is clear.

She is unstoppable, deploying a bewildering array of guns, drugs, syringes, poison and sex to achieve her ends. Having seen her in this performance of Handel’s opera, Agrippina, libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, at New York’s Met, none of Ms. DiDinato’s friends is likely to accept even a cup of coffee from her, without subjecting it to rigorous analysis. She’s deadly with the Americano!

A towering yellow throne of Agrippina’s husband, Emperor Claudio – seemingly lost at sea after a battle with the Britons – looms. It is the highly visible pivot around which this opera will revolve. Ms. DiDonato circles it, sizzles; simpers, scowls, snarls, slaps, seduces, swoons. Her emotional Richter scale is in the red zone throughout.

She has spent the best part of a year working herself into this role. Joyce Agrippina has cajoled and threatened in Munich and London – staged performances with Il Pomo d’Oro, the European baroque ensemble, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev, who also directs the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, to five-star acclaim. Those performances are now available on an Erato recording. Busy, busy, busy.

All this, as prep work to take on the full-scale Sir David McVicar production at the Met. Joyce DiDinato is that occasional wonder, an operatic star at the height of her considerable powers. She is familiar to, and beloved by, Met audiences. Her talent is unquestioned. But, to watch for three hours as the new, impossible heights she set herself in this performance were scaled with stylish ease, was an unforgettable privilege.

It has been a far from easy climb to the summit. In her late 20’s Ms. DiDinato concluded her singing style was strained, voice heading for early burn out. It was an act of consummate bravery to step off the relentless performance treadmill to reinvent herself, employing a more relaxed technique, putting less strain on the old throat.

Zachary Woolfe, the respected New York Times opera critic, described her voice in Agrippina as “pinched and strident under pressure”. I disagree. During the two performances I saw, one live, the other in HD, Ms. DiDinato’s voice rolled effortlessly through high, complex passages – if anything, adding colour as the music became more demanding. She has the relaxed ability to ad lib grace notes if she is comfortable with the pace of the performance. I noticed that the ad libs – never ostentatious – were different in each performance.  She is ever the opportunistic artist.

The voice restructuring decision has paid off in spades. With range enhanced, she delivers a classic mezzo growl at the bottom and an effortless, coloratura at the top. Emotional vocal delivery is her thing. Watch a Carnegie Hall masterclass in Mozart’s “Parto, ma tu ben mio”, Clemenza di Tito, to get my drift. She really can transform the technically talented, but often unexciting, operatic clay turned out by the likes of the Juilliard School, into inspiring sculpture. She provides others with the fire. And delivers it herself onstage.

It is amazing that this Agrippina, is the Met’s first. There is a lot of bunk talked about the house being too big for baroque works. Liverpool conductor, Harry Bicket, thoroughly grounded in baroque performances from leading the English Concert ensemble from 2008 -2017, convincingly slayed that dragon. The sound from the small ensemble, which included a Theorbo and an Archlute (first time I had heard of it. It is a more manageable Theorbo, apparently), was lustrous.

Agrippina, premiere in Venice in 1709, was the first opera Handel wrote in the Italian style. Oddly, the Met programme claimed it was his first and most successful opera. It wasn’t. Almira, premiered in his native Germany in 1705, ran for thirty consecutive nights in a row. Agrippina played for twenty-seven – a huge achievement in cynical Venice. It turned Handel into an international star.

The style is more taught than his later works. Reprises are kept to a minimum. Declamatory arias are characterised by kicking off with rapid-fire quaver sequences, which Ms. DiDinato sprayed around the auditorium like bullets from a Sten gun. Duck!

Reflective moments spill pure Handel melody – balm for the soul. The final aria, in which Agrippina is reconciled to Claudio (well, almost), seated front stage, is breathless. Tears! What a rollercoaster.

Handel shamelessly capitalised on this format to collar the Roman market. The Met’s staff writer, William Berger, makes the point that Handel was, in the 18^th century, as commercially savvy as Michael Uslan and the late Benjamin Melinker have were in the late 20^th/early 21^st, with their Batman franchise. Familiar characters are recycled. Sometimes in tragedies, sometimes in comedies, often in unlikely combinations. The only common theme is packed houses and huge profits.

This production by Sir David McVicar – which the Met irritatingly brags of as “new” – first saw the light of day in Belgium in 2000, re-emerged in the hands of English National Opera in 2007 and has now been brought up to date at the Met. It is none the worse for being twenty years old – like the latest iteration of a well-honed Bentley Continental – so why the diffidence about acknowledging its heritage?

Attempt at synopsis precis. The plot is labyrinthine: Action opens with news of Claudio’s death. Agrippina gulls Pallante, a general, and Narciso, a politician, into persuading the people that Nerone, her son by another marriage and a basket case, is the obvious choice to mount the throne. Nerone is acclaimed. She will manipulate him.

Pallente and Narciso are both infatuated with Agrippina, so she surreptitiously promises each that, with puppet-son on the throne, she will rule with them at her side. Both of them? Obviously not. What could possibly go wrong? The fuse on this conflicting plot-bomb is set ticking from the start.

Trumpets sound. Oops! Claudio is back, rescued by Ottone, who is in love with Poppea, a Roman socialite influencer on the booming Roman media start-up unicorn, TabletBook. In gratitude, Claudio names Ottone his heir. Agrippina, thwarted, decides to set everyone against each other. First, have Ottone stripped of the throne by convincing Claudio he has banned Poppea from seeing him. What a cheek!

Unknown to Agrippina, Nerone is also in love with Poppea and in a series of failed assaults on Poppea’s virginity, Claudio and Nerone are both thwarted. Meantime, characters, including Ottone, are hidden in cupboards, emerging to sing one-liner asides, as if chasing Brian Rix in a 1950s Whitehall farce.

I give up. After what can be euphemistically explained as oscillations in fortunes, Claudio decides to award the throne to Nerone and Poppea to Ottone. That’s what they want. What they really, really want. Chorus of the Tiber flowing happily. The end.

Sir David’s great achievement is to transform the conventional, static form of Baroque opera into a mesmerising display of constant comedic activity – none of it gratuitous, each sequence delivering razor-sharp satire and offering insightful character development. He makes the action relevant to the present day, without stretching the plot or straying into preachiness.

Here are some buffo highlights. Early on, Agrippina persuades the hapless Narciso, sung by counter tenor Nicholas Tamanga, kitted out in a preppy blazer, sporting an incongruous comb-over, wearing gold round rimmed specs and a permanently anxious expression, to support her cause by (sensitive readers skip on) giving him a discreet hand-job while they are sitting together, alongside members of an audience watching an unspecified performance – of something. Sex is a constant driving force of the plot.

Mercifully, the programme on Narciso’s lap spares us the detail, but the combination of his increasingly agonised crescendos, his flopping comb-over, Agrippina’s bored indifference and the onstage audience’s regular hissing, “Shhhhhh!” is hilarious. Let me put it thus. She eventually bends him to her way.

No McVicar detail is gratuitous. Claudio, back from the briny, ascends his throne boasting of conquest over the Britons. British royal regalia is delivered into his hands – perfect facsimiles of The Imperial State Crown, orb and sceptre are casually wielded, then, as casually, dumped on the steps. Bugger Brexit. Claudio is Michel Barnier, in a ridiculous military uniform.

An Act II confrontation between Poppea and Ottone takes place in a buzzing cocktail bar, a shaker-tossing waiter constantly on the move in the background. Poppea is chatted up by a tattooed hard man, gets pissed and unsuccessfully tries to hide behind a vase of flowers when Ottone pitchs up to drown his sorrows in a line-up of vodka shots.  Meanwhile, Poppea flakes out, slumped behind the flowers. The slapstick is slick and executed with perfect timing.

The bar scene features an onstage harpsicord, played with stunning dexterity by New Yorker, Bradley Brookshire, author of bodice-rippers such as, Edwin Fischer and Bach Pianism of the Weimar Republic. Mr Brookshire’s unstuffy tolerance of his bravura performance being simulated as a wild, drunken karaoke session, while draped over by cavorting Poppea, simul-playing her very own air-harpsichord, was truly game. A good sport.

The whole cast was stellar. Not a weak voice or performance to be found. Kate Lindsey, mezzo soprano, played Nerone. She had to depict a twitching, tattooed cokehead and was given seemingly impossible physical gyrations to perform to help her on her way. Cardio training in the gym was needed to enable her to sing while supporting herself on one arm and twisting on the ground; a Michael Jackson Thriller remake. She claims that, once in costume, her mobile face recognition device refused her access to her mobile phone. I can believe it. The passage where Nerone is cutting a line of cocaine in increasingly demented clouds of white powder teetered on the insane.

Ottone was Welsh counter tenor, Iestyn Davies, the only decent guy amidst a bunch of schemers. He exuded scrubbed, large-eared, primly-uniformed purity and, he too was called upon to be a song and dance man.

American, Brenda Rae, in a Met debut soprano role, was Poppea. She was magnificently ditzy – great voice and consummate acting. “I’m stamping my foot and I weally, weally mean it”! There was a wonderful moment, when she first encounters Agrippina, and they are both wearing the same sparkly beige, sheer, long dress. Nothing is said, but the visual daggers were flying, the smiling grimaces fixed.

Claudio was English Bass, Matthew Rose. He did not cut a naturally comic figure – bulky and bearded, but he has a fine voice and a surprising sense of mischief and comedic timing – especially in a scene when he is attempting to seduce Poppea, in a roughly simulated Full Monty sequence. In interview he claimed to have been influenced as a kid by the Carry On films. Think Bernard Bresslaw, then, in Carry On Up the Tiber.

Lesbo, Claudio’s servant, sung by American bass Christian Zaremba, is conventionally a minor role, elevated to prominence in Sir David’s production. Not only is he a servant, he appears at curtain up as a traveller, amongst the Roman ruins, including statues of the main characters, reading a guidebook. As he wanders, he crosses the fourth wall and moves from observer to onstage actor, rousing the statues into life. It is a razor-sharp device.

Duncan Rock, Scottish baritone was Pallante, played with a great sense of earnestness. In probably the funniest visual gag of the opera, he and Narcisus are dispatched, Pallente with a gun, Narcisus with a threatening chrome needle full of poison, to kill each other. Later, unheralded, they drift into the action, stage right, embraced in a Mexican stand-off, gun to Narcisus’ temple, needle to Pallente’s throat. They stagger about, exchanging sung insults, before deciding Agrippina is actually their common enemy and laying down weapons.

Another trick is the curtain – set designer John Macfarlane from Glasgow responsible – which opens with a huge painting of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the legendary wolf, transforms half way through to a lone wolf – depicted as blood stained scavenger – and finally transforms to defeated wolf, on its back with legs in the air? What did it mean? God knows. But it was interesting.

Choreographer, Andrew George, provided lots of military quick-step swagger, leavened by the occasional hip twitch. No-one was allowed to become over serious. Build a role – and wait for the putdown.

Eventually, matters are resolved as Claudio offers Poppea to Nerone in marriage and Ottone the throne. Cue wonderful aside from a miserable Nerone, “To be denied the throne – and have to take a wife as well! What misery.” Ottone spurns the throne for love of Poppea. Claudio says – “only kidding” – and their true wishes are granted.

As the Tiber flows in harmony, in one of Handel’s most moving finale ensembles – except for one last, inexplicable, screech of frustrated dismay from Agrippina (is there any pleasing this damned woman) – the characters resume their original places on their plinths. Lesbo, the savvy servant, steps back over the fourth wall, finishes reading his yellow book and closes it, turning a knowing smile to the audience.

The music dies away, sleep descends, lights dim. The Met audience burst into a rapture of applause, the likes of which I have not experienced in twenty years of regular attendance. Every “Bravo” and “Brava” was hard earned, and richly deserved.