Opera Review ‘Semele’ Review: A Delicious Mashup of Genres

Harry Bicket and the English Concert return to Carnegie Hall for their annual Handel presentation.

Soprano Brenda Rae and Benjamin Hulett with the English Concert and the Clarion Choir in Handel’s ‘Semele’ at Carnegie Hall Photo: © 2019 Steve J. Sherman By Heidi Waleson April 15, 2019 3:49 p.m. ET

New York

Since their initial “Radamisto” in 2013, Harry Bicket and the English Concert’s Handel opera at Carnegie Hall has become a much-anticipated annual event, and Sunday’s performance of “Semele” (1744) continued this streak of exceptional music-making. With an exquisite English libretto by the poet William Congreve, “Semele” is a delicious mashup of genres, effortlessly melding comedy, sacred oratorio, and Italian operatic tragedy. Leading from the harpsichord, Mr. Bicket and his forces balanced those elements from the very first measures of the overture, as they countered heavy, rhythmic accents with upward-rushing arpeggios in the strings, and then sculpted the score’s theatrical arc, maintaining momentum through nearly three hours of music that includes a great many hit tunes.

Semele, a mortal who captures Jupiter’s fancy, is destroyed by her own ambition (to become immortal), with a big assist from Jupiter’s angry wife, Juno. Brenda Rae offered an oddly subtle characterization of the title role; her soprano was more lyric than sparkling, and sometimes overly soft. She was at her best in Semele’s moments of pure, happy triumph, such as “Endless pleasure, endless love,” after she has been extracted by divine intervention from her unwanted wedding ceremony to Athamas in Act I and has Jupiter in her thrall; and Act III’s, “Myself I shall adore,” in which Ms. Rae unleashed increasingly elaborate ornamental roulades to celebrate what Semele thinks is her imminent ascent to godhead. Ms. Rae was less persuasive in sorrow and defiance. She could have used more assertiveness, for example, in “No, no, I’ll take no less,” when Semele fatally insists that Jupiter appear to her as lightning and thunder. Instead, she receded, and her coloratura on the word “alarm” became almost inaudible.

Elizabeth DeShong, singing the double role of Juno and Semele’s sister Ino, took the afternoon’s vocal honors. Her opulent mezzo has contralto power in its lower range, and she embodied the comic side of Juno’s jealous rage as well as its viciousness, from her speedy accuracy in “Hence, Iris, hence away,” to her sidelong glances at her victim, to her nihilistic triumphal statement: “Love’s a bubble / Gain’d with trouble / And in possessing dies.” With his elegant tenor, Benjamin Hulett made Jupiter a lover, a manipulator (the famous “Where’er you walk” was clearly his ploy to enchant Semele and distract her from her ambitions), and finally, a truly regretful destroyer.

Bass Soloman Howard was forthright in the double role of Cadmus, Semele’s father, and Somnus, the god of sleep, coerced by Juno to destroy Semele. Ailish Tynan supplied a bright soprano and good comic timing for Iris, Juno’s servant, and countertenor Christopher Lowrey made the most of the role of Athamas, whose disappointment at his interrupted wedding to Semele can seem like filler. The superb 28-member Clarion Choir was a revelation: Full-voiced, with rhythmic precision and articulation as clear as the orchestra’s, the ensemble easily switched gears from the sensual languor of “Endless pleasure, endless love” to the moving, oratorical statement of the opera’s dark lesson: “Nature to each allots his proper sphere / But that forsaken we like meteors err: / Toss’d through the void, by some rude shock we’re broke, / And all our boasted fire is lost in smoke.”

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).