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The Barber Opera 2009: Handel’s Agrippina
PRESS RELEASE
The Barber Opera 2009:
Handel’s Agrippina
2009 is a significant year for the Barber Institute, the Barber Opera, Handel and Agrippina. The Barber was opened seventy years ago this summer. The first Barber Opera, Handel’s Xerxes, was staged twenty years later, in 1959, the bicentenary of the composer’s death. This year we commemorate both his 250th anniversary and fifty years of opera at the Barber. Agrippina, moreover, will be 300 years old in December!
Opera was established at the Barber by Anthony Lewis, elected Professor of Music in 1947 at the age of 32. He came from the BBC, where he had devised a series entitled ‘Handel in Rome’ and helped plan the Third Programme (Radio 3). At Birmingham he cultivated his interest in Handel and Purcell, conducting the first English recordings of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and King Arthur and of Handel’s Semele and Sosarme. He also conducted numerous Barber concerts, including concert performances of such dramatic works as Susanna (1951), Esther (1957) and Bonduca (1959). He was obviously working towards the staged production of opera.
The Barber operas of the 1960s played a significant role in the revival of Handel’s operas in England and made a deep impression on the audience, both vocally and visually. The Handel operas, in particular, are remembered for their high quality of vocal performance. Lewis recruited first-class singers, some of whom went on to enjoy an international career. The best-known example is Janet Baker, who appeared as Ariodante, Orlando and Alcestis (Admeto, 1968), but there were also many others.
Under Lewis’s successor, Ivor Keys, the Barber opera continued as an annual event until 1973, then became biennial. Keys presented four operas by Handel — Rodelinda (1972), Julius Caesar (1977), Sosarme (1979) and Poro (1985) — and eight by other composers. Since 1986, when Keys retired, the opera has become an occasional event, owing largely to changes in the economic climate and in British university life. Cherubini was featured in 1991, Monteverdi in 1997 and Steffani in 2000; Handel returns in September.
Agrippina is one of the two operas that he composed in Italy in his early twenties. It was his first big ‘hit’: its opening run of 27 performances was unprecedented; the audience in Venice, where it was premiered in 1709, had never heard anything like it! It is described by Winton Dean, the doyen of Handel scholarship, as ‘much more than a farcical opera buffa. The situations are full of humour, but for the most part the characters are motivated by strong, even passionate impulses. As in all the greatest comedies, there is an undertow of profound commitment’. This year’s production will explore all these qualities, entertain the eye and the ear, and honour those who, over the last fifty years, have cultivated opera at the Barber.
Colin Timms, Peyton and Barber Professor of Music
16 June 2009
Ends
| For further information, please contact Jo Sweet, Concerts Administrator, on 0121 414 5791 or concerts@barber.org.uk |