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The first thing to say is that this is a compact account, carefully trimmed down to a brisk two hours 15 minutes. It’s testimony to Glover’s skill and scholarship that you scarcely notice the cuts in a drama that drives us with steady momentum from Jephtha’s rash vow to sacrifice the first thing he lays eyes upon to the brink-ofexecution angelic intervention to save his daughter Iphis. Moral ambiguities and Old Testament absolutes brood and thunder through Handel’s score, beaten into us in the chorus’s hymn to orthodoxy: ‘Whatever is, is right’ – an interesting foil to Glover’s understated approach, the antithesis to an account such as John Eliot Gardiner’s 1988 live recording with its bristly, restless articulation. This is emphatically English Handel; no Italianate excesses here, just lean precision and beautiful mellowness of tone. The contemporary instruments (played with period-informed technique) naturally soften musical brushstrokes and fill out the texture, and the voices of Music of the Baroque’s chorus match them for blend.
Casting also prioritises beauty. David Portillo vaults and storms his way through the title-role with serious panache, youthful, agile and muscular through ‘His mighty arm’ and the other military arias. No grizzled patriarchs here. If there’s a criticism (and it seems ungenerous), it’s a lack of delicacy when pathos takes over from heroics. ‘Waft her, angels’ gleams but doesn’t move, and the mad scene never quite gets close enough to the brink of either fragility or desperation.
There’s stylish work from Lauren Snouffer’s Iphis, shaping a musical arc from opening freshness and innocence to tragic stature and maturity in ‘Happy they!’ and the farewell scene. She’s well paired by Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s bright, lyrical Hamor. Neal Davies supplies supporting luxury as Zebul and Clara Osowski is all heavy cream and velvet as Storgé, joined by a gloriously woody obbligato flute for ‘In gentle murmurs’.
If you prefer your Biblical drama raw and unvarnished, then this pristine account may not satisfy. But for all others, Glover’s live performance has a lot going for it. |
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