The English Consort, Harry Bicket

Birmingham Town Hall, 6 February 2014

Cast from some of the finest Handelians available and given the vigour of Harry Bicket’s conducting, this presentation could not fail; and so it proved.

Rosemary Joshua was as limpid a heroine as one could wish, and her Didymus, Tim Mead, a florid counter-tenor who brought genuine emotion to his singing. Sarah Connolly has some of Handel’s most moving music for Irene’s passionate support and consolation, and matched the more rugged approach of Kurt Streit’s Septimus.

Jonathan Best was a late replacement as Valens and seemed a little uncomfortable at first, but soon settled. The choir of Trinity Wall Street were new to me in terms of live performance and brought bounce and enthusiasm in addition to splendid articulation.

The English Consort, for all its limited size, has some splendid soloists, with Lisa Beznosiuk a moving dove for Theodora with her baroque flute.

The important organ continuo part was somewhat lost even in the capable hands of Stephen Farr, and Harry Bicket provided the harpsichord part himself.

Theodora has never had the following it deserves and it struck me on this occasion that part of the problem may be the incomprehensibility of the text. Morell writes in Latin rather than in English, with the verbs at the end of a sentence. Consequently, as a listener, we have little understanding of what is being sung until the end of the first full phrase. To take one example, Didymus sings Deeds of kindness to display and it is not until much later we get to the verb disobey. In English, the text should read Who can disobey the call to display deed of kindness, sue for pity or woo for mercy? Perhaps we need Neil Jenkins to do for Handel what he so admirably did for Haydn! BH