Dear Jeremy Eichler: This is what Teresa Wakim looks like

For future reference.

Sometimes the disinterest with which the Globe arts staff views its hometown is almost embarrassing.

Just a few weeks ago, a seemingly ignorant Jeffrey Gantz innocently gave away the big reveal at the core of the Huntington's Our Town.  And in today's paper, Jeremy Eichler actually reviews a performance that wasn't there, in last night's Handel and Haydn rendering of Purcell's The Indian Queen.

Eichler gives the concert a good notice (a surprise, as he has often sniffed at H&H), and I'd agree in general with his assessment - you should go see the last performance, at Sanders Theatre this Sunday.

The odd thing about the review, however, is that it praises a singer who wasn't there. The lovely and talented Teresa Wakim (at left) is a mainstay of Boston's vocal scene - indeed, she is one of its leading sopranos, whom I've reviewed or mentioned 15 times in the last four years. She has sung at Handel and Haydn, Boston Baroque, Blue Heron - in fact almost everywhere.

Alas, illness prevented her from singing at Handel and Haydn last night.   But Jeremy Eichler seems to think she did anyway!  In his review, he announces that "Teresa Wakim sang with crystalline tone and graceful musicality."  So apparently poor Ms. Wakim was warbling with crystalline tone through a bout with the flu.

An honest mistake, you say, easily explained by his not reading (or not receiving) a program insert? Not really - although that probably contributed to the flub.  For Wakim was actually replaced by three different members of the Handel and Haydn chorus - Sonja Tengblad, Jessica Cooper and Brenna Wells, all accomplished singers in their own rights, took over the various solos she would have sung.

So did Eichler somehow not notice that three different ladies marched downstage at various times to take over Wakim's duties at different junctures? Did only one of them impress him? Or did he think they were all named Teresa Wakim?  Enquiring minds want to know!

Sigh.  I don't know what's more depressing: that Jeremy Eichler is so out of touch with our classical music scene that he doesn't know who Teresa Wakim is (which would basically be like my not knowing who Karen MacDonald is) - or that he was so disconnected from the performance in front of him that he never scanned it against the cast list in the program.

All I can say - Teresa, you sound even better when you're actually singing!

So get well soon, my dear!

A mostly magnificent Magnificat from Handel & Haydn

Detail from Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat

I'd been looking forward to the Handel and Haydn season opener - a Bach orgy focused on the Magnificat - because artistic director Harry Christophers is a Bach fanatic, and the program had been cannily designed to draw in the crowds (with "Air on a G String," and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"), while showcasing some worthy rareties (particularly Cantata 71, Gott ist mein König).

So last Friday Symphony Hall was packed - with an audience, as a few other critics have begun to note, younger and more diverse than most.  And thank Gott, the performance did not disappoint.

But it didn't quite astound me, either.  Indeed, to be honest, it seemed to me that Christophers' vision of "the greatest composer who ever lived" (his own words) never quite came into focus - or rather it moved in and out of focus over the course of the evening.

Which puts me in that tricky position I'm famous for: I'm that critic who first makes a fuss over artistic greatness, and then later, when everybody else shows up to applaud, begins finding fault.  So let me say I'm thrilled that Handel and Haydn is finally getting the credit it has long deserved - even, at last, positive reviews in the Globe!  (Proof that everyone got the memo.)  But I was still slightly surprised by a few of the raves this concert received.  Christophers' special genius was often in evidence, and both the chorus and the orchestra at their best were beyond superb.  But as I've said before, they're simply the best chorus in the region (so by now I expect to be stunned); yet Friday's opener wasn't their best night; there were more than a few moments (particularly around entrances) that simply weren't as clean as they could/should have been (and that's important, particularly in Bach).

This was true in the strings as well, here and there (the winds were at their frisky best, however, throughout); more problematic was that Christophers drew all his soloists from the chorus itself - and alas, didn't really reveal any new stars there.  All of these fresh faces were blessed with intriguing vocal timbres and subtle control (that's why it's a great chorus) - but a few seemed a bit uncomfortable in the limelight, or lacked the power to fully command a space the size of Symphony.

Still I was grateful as always to hear H&H's secret weapons, soprano Teresa Wakim and alto Emily Marvosh.  Wakim, of course, is a known quantity, and she was at the top of her game Friday, hitting the lustrously pearly notes she's famous for with ease, first in Cantata 71 and later in the Magnificat.  Marvosh, in contrast, is still making her mark - although you could argue after last weekend that she has made her mark.   She was in fine voice from the start, but only grew suppler and more expressive as the evening went on, while her physical presence has never been more striking - a charming, almost mischievous gamine, she seemed to morph the Virgin into Diana, and radiated intelligent joy throughout her contributions to the Magnificat.  I have a hunch that, like Wakim, she's a great actress as well as a great singer.

Harry Christophers in action.

There were also some strong turns from reliable tenor Stefan Reed, and bass Jacob Cooper had his moments - but elsewhere the solos were variable.  As I've opined before, the central artistic problem at H&H these days is finding a team of soloists who can stand up to the chorus (perhaps even the chorus can't do that!).  Luckily, they've signed up for Messiah this year the stunning Karina Gauvin, who may be the greatest interpreter of Handel on the planet - if she can't match this chorale, no one can.

On the instrumental side, it seemed to me the horns scraped a bit more than usual (although this is inevitable with natural horns), particularly in the opening overture of the Orchestral Suite No. 3, where they're particularly exposed, and playing high in their ranges.  All this was forgotten, however, in Harry's ravishing rendition of what came next, that famous "Air on a G String," which here swelled with a slow, delicate suspense, and heartbreaking transparency.  In a word: rapture.

Later there were more high points, particularly from Wakim and Marvosh, in the relatively light  Gott ist mein König, which is not actually sacred music but was rather composed as a kind of fanfare for the town council of Mühlhausen - and which seemed to dovetail nicely with the previous buoyant dances that closed the Orchestral Suite.  Less convincing perhaps was the way Christophers pulled together  two Sinfonias and "Jesus bleibet meine Freude" into his own "suite" later in the program. But then to be honest, Bach suites are never very unified anyway, and the Sinfonia from Cantata 18 featured some truly exquisite interplay between the violas and the winds (Christophers always illuminates the structure of what he's doing, even as he makes it dance).  Certainly "Jesus" was as transporting as it should be, with the chorus seemingly buoyed on soft surges from the strings that glinted with colors from the brass.

The trumpets were in even better form during the Magnificat itself - a compact work with the range of a full symphony, the many moods of which unfolded with Christophers' characteristic mix of eloquence and passion.  Once more Wakim and Marvosh were the stand-out soloists, the winds were again delightful, and the chorus shouldered the closing verses with astonishing power and clarity.  I admit whenever these folks sing a line like "World without end, Amen," I always find myself indeed wishing the moment could go on forever.

Handel and Haydn crown Wakim

George II at his coronation, for which Handel composed Zadok the Priest

The weekend before last (yes, I'm that late with this!) the Handel and Haydn Society had almost everything required for a grand concert - in fact the program was bursting with some of choral music's greatest hits (with something by Handel and something by Haydn; Mozart was also along for the ride).  What's more, the program, dubbed "Coronation," boasted a loose kind of theme, if you will; proclamations of benevolent power were to be heard over and over again, in various keys and modes.

There was only one thing missing.

A soprano.

For Rosemary Joshua, the concert's headliner, had dropped out of the concert only nine days earlier.   But luckily the Society could turn to its own secret weapon, soprano Teresa Wakim (below), who has long sung as a featured soloist in the Society's chorale.  Knowing that she had to come back a star, this chorus girl stepped calmly and confidently into Joshua's shoes for Mozart's famous Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165, as well as the Mass in C Major, K. 317 ("Coronation").  And she left the stage crowned, I think, an audience favorite.


Although at first Wakim's grip on the vocal throne wasn't entirely secure, I admit.  Her low notes are lovely, but lack a certain power, and in the opening of Exsultate, jubilate she struggled slightly against the fullness of the orchestration behind her.   But her upper register is her glory, and once Wakim could climb there, the glowing pearl of her tone, matched with crisp diction and a remarkably graceful agility (even in Mozart's fleetest passages) charmed the audience utterly.

She was just as strong in the Coronation Mass, although I have to say I find this particular stretch of Mozart not entirely compelling; its grand confidence grows bland to me; its Kyrie is not a plea but a command, and its Credo a happy but rather long march.  Still the Benedictus and Agnus Dei are worth waiting for - and Wakim was if anything more dazzling here than she had been earlier.  She was joined by alto Paula Murrihy and baritone Sumner Thompson - both also refugees from the H&H chorus, as well as tenor Thomas Cooley, who together made up one of the best-matched sets of soloists I can recall in some time at H&H; the only problem was that Mozart doesn't give his alto or baritone much to do (and as I'm a big fan of Thompson, I found this particularly disappointing).

The chorus matched their usual high standard throughout the Mass, and were actually quite stunning in the famous Zadok the Priest, composed by Handel for the coronation of George II (who, in the rather fatuous portrait above, hardly looks worthy of its heroic blast).  The piece has been played at every coronation since, and the way H&H sings it, you understand why.

I've been dwelling on the vocal aspects of this performance, but actually the concert was a carefully programmed balance of choral and orchestral music - likewise focused on a sense of grand, royal occasion. The busy "Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" always seems to me to have been mis-titled (it feels more like "Just Before the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" - you can almost hear servants scampering throughout).  Under Christophers' baton, the orchestra's playing was appropriately lightly pointed, but not, it seemed, focused on any particular interpretive objective.

But Haydn's Symphony No. 85 in B-flat Major, dubbed La Reine as it was a reported favorite of Marie Antoinette, proved another matter entirely.  Here what I expected to be another light entertainment all but sparkled with attentive insights; Christophers kept things brisk, but even his final Presto also seemed to me to brim with surprising emotional depth.  The strings sounded superb, but were more than matched by the winds, particularly in a Menuetto which seemed almost breathtakingly perfect.  Wakim took the audience laurels at this particular concert, but perhaps the most deeply satisfying musical performance of the evening came from the orchestra in this ravishing interpretation; to crown the season, the H&H orchestra here sounded as good as, or better than, they ever have.