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by George Frideric Handel, directed by Zhang Huan

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

May 9-26, 2012

“Singers Save Semele from Becoming Toast”

The Canadian Opera Company’s first-ever production of Handel’s Semele is a complex case of plusses and minuses.  Musically, the opera is a delight with outstanding performances from four of the six soloists including Jane Archibald in the title role.  Dramatically, the production is often a mess with famed Chinese conceptual artist Zhang Huan throwing one idea after another at the piece, not caring particularly whether it made sense or not.  This kind of problem is by no means exclusive to Zhang, who is here after all, directing his first opera.  Rather, it’s a problem that arises when any director is more interested in dramatizing the miscellaneous ideas an opera or play suggests rather than in trying to convey the opera’s story in the most effective manner.

This is not a concept production like Robert Carsen’s Iphigénie en Tauride of last year, where Carsen saw that the three main characters were boxed in by fate and therefore set the opera inside a big black box.  Rather, it is a production based on combinations of images that sometimes do, but often don’t, make sense together.  The central image for the entire opera is an actual 450-year-old Chinese temple that Zhang saved from destruction.  There is nothing wrong with setting an English-language opera based on a Greek myth in China, especially when history shows that the story of Semele is not originally Greek in the first place.  It was brought to Greece by the Thracians, who adopted it during their sojourn in the Middle East. 

The temple itself looks ancient and is thus suitable for an ancient tale.  What jars is the lack of a consistent tone or point of view on the story.  The programme notes that Zhang cuts the opera short and deliberately omits Apollo’s prediction that Bacchus will rise from Semele’s ashes along with the subsequent triumphal chorus.  Instead he wants to end the opera “leaving the singers to lament Semele’s death”.

If depicting the story of Semele as tragedy were Zhang’s intention, he certainly doesn’t show it in the first act.  Athamas (Anthony Roth Costanzo), the Prince of Boeotia who is to marry Semele in the temple, has to help his red pantomime horse up onto the stage piggyback.  Once there, the antics of the pantomime horse provide an almost constant distraction from the human drama – not that Zhang portrays that drama as all that serious.  Costume designer Han Feng has clad Cadmus (Steven Humes), Semele’s father, as a Chinese mandarin and Semele (Jane Archibald) as a Chinese bride.  But Athamas is dressed in 16th-century European garb with doublet and puffy breeches.  Ino (Allyson McHardy), Semele’s sister in love with Athamas, wears a European-style academic robe with matching mortarboard.  She also has a 1920’s hairstyle and wears a Japanese obi tied askew in the back.  Is Han saying anything with this?  Well, no, since it is Semele, not Ino, who is breaking tradition by not wishing to marry since she’s quite happy carrying on her affair with the god Jupiter.  Meanwhile, the temple priests play a totally undignified game of “You can’t get your statue” with Athamas, who has to dive under their legs and other nonsense.  His big aria about his passion “Hymen, haste, thy torch prepare” ends with him kissing the horse’s behind. 

Flames and confusion and we hear that Jupiter has swooped down from heaven and carried Semele off.  We next see her floating over the temple backed by the moon and singing of her happiness.  This might be an effective image except that instead of making a simple arc over the set, the moon and Semele begin swinging in opposite directions like two pendulums as if something has gone wrong with the flying system.  This is not the only inconsistency.  The priests, who had been sitting on what looked to be globes of stone, suddenly pick them up as if they were beach balls and gesture with them meaninglessly. 

Things proceed to get worse in the next scene where the temple has been decorated with bamboo to represent the secret hideaway Jupiter has built for Semele.  When Jupiter leads Semele off to cavort in the grove, the pantomime horse returns, now with a huge erection, though apparently gelded, and tries to mount and is mounted by various of the gathered nymphs and swains.  The nymphs and swains become aroused and take off their priestly robes to reveal modern day boxer shorts, bras and panties.  In the following scene, Somnus (also Steven Humes), god of sleep, is discovered in bed on top of the temple with an enormous inflatable plastic doll.  Clearly, if Zhang really wants us to take the story so seriously that he truncates the Handel’s ending, he would have encouraged none of this nonsense.

Besides all this, Zhang begins and ends the opera badly.  During the overture we have to watch a silent documentary on the discovery and rebuilding of the temple.  It would all be very interesting if we came to watch a documentary but it distracts from the music and suggests that for Zhang, the temple, not Semele, is the main story.  Zhang finishes the opera with a false ending.  The screen descends after Semele’s death, only to show a film of an image of a woman being washed away first by rain and then by sand.  Then the screen rises to allow the chorus to sing their lament over Semele’s death while the temple sweeper who began the action sweeps past them.  They sing, “Nature to each allots his proper sphere, / But that forsaken we like meteors err”.  Does Zhang mean this affirmation in a western opera of the rightness of a social hierarchy to have implications for modern China or not?  Is that why Zhang has the chorus end the opera by humming the Internationale?After all that has gone before it is impossible to tell.

Fortunately, the singing of most of the cast is of a very high level.  If you thought Jane Archibald was fantastic as Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos last year, wait till you hear her in Semele.  The incredibly rapid runs, the fearlessly accurate leaps to stratospheric notes, were simply spectacular.  Her showpiece aria “Myself I shall adore” deservedly received the longest sustained applause of the evening.  Yet, she was beautifully touching in the slow arias “With fond desiring” and “I ever am granting” that conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini had accompanied only by cello and harpsichord for the first and only by cello alone for the second.  If only Zhang had allowed the words and music to speak for themselves as they do here with such simple eloquence the whole production could have been a success.

With her powerful, dark mezzo-soprano, Allyson McHardy clearly distinguished her two roles of the rash, girlish Ino from the imperious Juno, wife of Jupiter, who plots a gruesome but appropriate revenge on the hapless Semele.  She sang her rage aria “Hence, Iris, hence away” to tremendous effect.  As her messenger Iris, misrepresented here as a silly maid, Katherine Whyte gave a terrific account of “There, from mortal cares retiring”.   

Among the men, Steven Humes has a wonderfully strong, rich bass-baritone and well distinguished his two roles as the authoritative Cadmus and as the lethargic Somnus.  As Athamas, Anthony Roth Costanzo displayed a fairly bland countertenor until his flourishes and ornamentation which revealed a voice with more fullness and body.  William Burden does not appear to the best advantage as Jupiter.  His habit of beginning every line with an Italianate sob is out of place in Handel and soon becomes tiresome.  Under pressure his voice becomes nasal which rather undermined the effect of his ornamentation.  He does not even render “Where’re you walk”, the opera’s most famous aria, as the delight it should be.

Rinaldo Alessandrini is renowned as an expert in baroque music, especially baroque opera.  His tempi are all well chosen, but he makes no attempt to draw a lighter tone from the COC Orchestra that would be in keeping with the period.  Other baroque specialists, like Henry Bickett in Idomeneo in 2010, have been able to make the COC Orchestra sound as close to a band of period instruments as possible, but under Alessandrini it sounded distinctly heavy.

Given a production borrowed from the Théâtre Royale de la Monnaie and KT Wong Foundation that has only the ancient temple going for it but otherwise no consistency of tone or conception, the current Semele should rate only one star if the level of the singing were also inferior.  Yet, the performances of Archibald, McHardy, Whyte and Humes are outstanding and truly thrilling, despite all the distractions, and would be a shame to miss.  Let’s hope the COC programmes Semele again, but in a production that supports, rather than undermines, the singers’ efforts.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A different version of this review will appear in Opera News later this year.

Photo: Jane Archibald and William Burden. ©2012 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.