Bard. James Bard.

Daniel Jones as Hamlet/Bond.

It's hard not to like John J. King's From Denmark with Love (through this weekend only at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre) - just as it's hard not to like the playwright himself, an infectiously friendly mainstay of the local scene (and, full disclosure, a friend of the Hub Review).

Like its writer, the show itself - a free-wheeling mash-up of Hamlet and the entire James Bond canon - is often the theatrical equivalent of a puppy: endlessly energetic, always ready for fun, and usually more than a little horny. Indeed, if you're the type to be offended by hearing a line like "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt . . ." directed to a rigid feature of the male anatomy - well, then this is not the show for you.

So you've been warned!  On the other hand, if ironically "tasteless" sexual innuendo IS your cup of tea, then you'll be glad to hear that in From Denmark with Love, Hamlet's flesh is too-too solid practically 24/7; and his Mommy issues are hardly latent, either.  Ophelia is likewise hot-to-trot, Gertrude's always up for a roll in the hay, and as Claudius speaks with the crass accent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know what's always on his mind.  As a result, it seems all these characters are constantly struggling into or out of a kilt, thong, or something even skimpier as they scamper through vignettes from Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me, Dr. No, and . . . well, you get the idea.

Beyond that, I couldn't tell you much more about King's "plot" - frankly, it's so convoluted I couldn't follow it half the time; and most of the turning points are shouted in a thick Scottish burr, anyhow - I guess because Sean Connery is Scottish? Who knows; luckily the accent work is broad yet hilariously precise - particularly when the versatile Daniel Jones (who plays both Hamlet and Claudius, so at the climax offs himself) is responsible for it.  And if you're lost, you can always kind of figure out where you are by simply tracking the skits against Shakespeare's play (which, despite everything, the show roughly follows).

To be honest, I still felt Mr. King could have cut a good fifteen minutes from his script and it would only have come off as sharper and funnier; at over an hour and a half, it's almost too much of a good thing. (But then Hamlet's too long too, isn't it.)  And the cast in general (and Brett Milanowski in particular) could have shouted a little bit less; louder isn't always funnier.  Although maybe they were hollering simply to keep themselves pumped for the relentless action, which was non-stop, and wittily choreographed (I think) by Meron Langsner Angel Aguilar Veza. And even when the double entendres had gotten a little tired, a clever bit of physical business would often strike me as hilarious. The parody of the requisite Maurice Binder title sequence (all you need, it turns out, is a scrim, a backlight, and a few cast members in their underwear) was unforgettable, and I got a big kick out of the way Q was always popping out of the woodwork, and the way Goldfinger's famous laser was here reduced to a laser pointer. A running gag in which Bond titles were worked into Shakespeare's blank verse was likewise inventive (yes, they even squeezed in Dr. No and Quantum of Solace), and Jones was matched in witty, self-aware stamina by the rest of the cast, which included Bob Mussett, Terrence Patrick Haddad (as "FortinJaws"), Bridgett Hayes, Janelle Mills, and Chelsea Schmidt.  Together these game farceurs knocked the living daylights out of both the Bard and Bond.

For Milanowski, Mills, and Jones, the Bard is not enough.

The X Factor at BMOP

Composer Mason Bates

Ok, it's time to play catch up.  A vacation and a bad cold have meant little posting of late - my thanks to all those who have been showing up at the site anyway, hoping I might have something to say!

Of course I did have something to say, particularly about the Boston Modern Orchestra Project concert of a week and a half ago, dubbed "Gen OrchXtrated," which focused on three leading Gen X composers: the photogenic Mason Bates (yes, that's a composer, not a pop star, at left) as well as Huang Ruo and Andrew Norman (see below), two other rising stars who maybe won't make the pages of GQ, but deserve to be heard in the concert hall just the same.

"Gen X" is of course a famously loose term - and it may be worth noting that as this trio were all born at the tail end of the 70's, they're perhaps closer to "Gen Y" than "Gen X" in sensibility.  Certainly Bates and Norman - both winners of multiple academic prizes (Rome, Berlin, et al.) seem absorbed in the technological culture of the millennium; Ruo seems to harken back to older (indeed ancient) forms.

That none of these three - at least judging from the pieces on offer at BMOP - really has a distinctive musical voice is, I admit, somewhat troubling (especially given the accolades that have come their way).  But of course new voices are few and far between these days.  And to be fair, you can feel these young composers attempting to make new conceptual statements out of old musical parts (in a way their works feel more like criticism than art).  Bates and Norman seem absorbed in refurbishing minimalism with an ironic technical gloss, while Ruo, in his Path of Echoes: Chamber Symphony No. 1, has attempted to conjure a new form of aural landscape.

Composer Huang Ruo

For the title "Path of Echoes" admits to a double meaning - it could refer to either a path full of echoes, or the intersecting paths taken by those echoes themselves. Indeed, Ruo is probably more concerned with the second interpretation - his cascades of glissandi seem to move past and through each other (as his time signature subtly shifts to create the impression of slight sonic delays) to generate the impression of a sonic "map" matching the mountain landscape in which the composer first found inspiration for the piece (which ends with a cacophonous landslide).  There were hints here of Asian folk motifs, randomized through a filter of John Cage and other modernists - which gradually built a web of complexity that seemed indebted to minimalism; but nothing, alas, felt emphatically new.  Still, the piece was often haunting, although perhaps the BMOP performance wasn't quite subtle enough to draw out the detailed sense of "space" that I think Ruo had in mind.

The orchestra did better by Norman and Bates, whose work depended more on energy and drive.  Both seem to want to link a kind of charging minimalist churn to the rising role of technology in our lives; in much of Bates' Sea-Blue Circuitry, for instance, the orchestra - careening through a  series of musical quotes from composers ranging from Stravinsky to Copland - was accompanied (or driven) by a kind of techno click-track (generated, I think, acoustically), so the piece sounded a bit like symphonic "house" music. And tellingly, when that track died, so did the work's drive, as it drifted into a doomily serene movement Bates has dubbed "Marine Snow," which is the poetic term for the detritus that drifts from the ocean's surface to its floor (sometimes it takes it days to hit bottom). So it seemed that in Bates' vision, if the culture wasn't dancing as fast as it could to the beat, it was in danger of becoming a dead shark.  (Although don't worry, the power returned in the third movement, and the piece leapt to techno-life again for a racing finale dubbed "Gigawatt Greyhound.")

Norman's vision was, if anything, even darker. The premiere of his Play (the result of a residency at BMOP) relied, like Sea-Blue Circuitry, on a pumping minimalist energy, and a welter of musical quotations - only Norman pushed his technical metaphors even further than Bates: Play was divided not into movements, but "Levels," as video games are, and its phrases were often interrupted by sudden percussive thwacks, like the gunfire in Grand Theft Auto and its ilk.  Indeed, the orchestra itself was converted into a concrete metaphor for group gaming - "Level 2" began with isolated, awkward phrases from individual instruments, with the strings all but miming the bowing of their instruments.  This pushed the orchestra a little closer to performance art than I really want it to go - but the resulting scene did feel like an eerie metaphor for those vast armies of World of Warcraft fans, out in cyber space itching to engage with their game but unable to do so without other, well, players; it was an amusing nod to the basically collective nature of an activity whose devotees tend to think of themselves as rebels and loners.

And like Sea-Blue Circuitry, Play tended to collapse into lonely nihilism on a dime; even in its early, frenzied stages, one could make out a lost little phrase (not quite a theme) that returned in the final "level" (after some characteristically fortissimo blasts) to close out the piece on a bleakly mournful note.  After the game was over, there was apparently nothing left.  Which may be why truly new music is so hard to come by these days.

Composer Andrew Norman

Coppélia's comeback

Swanilda teaches old Coppelius a lesson about living dolls.  Photos: Rosalie O'Connor.

Few ballets are as lovable as Coppélia, particularly in the Balanchine version, which Boston Ballet is reviving through this weekend at the Opera House.  Not that the great Mr. B really investigates the quirky subtexts of the ballet's libretto - which was inspired by one of the darker musings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, that peculiar font of nineteenth-century fantasy who's also the source of The Nutcracker and, of course, Offenbach's Tales from Hoffmann.

Indeed, the ballet all but ignores the darker corners of its source, and instead conjures a straightforward folk tale about a foolish village stud named Frantz (Jeffrey Cirio) who has fallen hard for the perfections of the mechanical Coppélia, the handiwork of nutty professor Dr. Coppélius (Boyko Dossev).

Never fear, saucy flesh-and-blood Swanilda (Misa Kuranaga, above with Dossev), Frantz's former squeeze, is on hand to shake him out of his delusion (even though she mostly shakes up the dotty old Coppélius instead). And the couple is happily re-united at the finale in a wedding scene that's lavish even by Balanchine's grandest standards. Perhaps that's because this extended divertissement is the only part of the ballet that's pure Mr. B - the rest is a gloss on earlier work by St. Léon, Petipa, and Cecchetti (although in several set-pieces, such as the peasant dance in Act I, we can feel hints of the master's mature complexity).

Cirio and Kuranaga triumph in the last act.

Until then though, I admit, Coppélia sometimes feels like a gentle, conventional entertainment; but it's obvious why the Ballet has revived it - in Kuranaga and Dossev they have the perfect dancers for Coppélia and her creator, and it's wonderful to see both of them dazzle us again, just as they did in the Ballet's mounting three years ago. (It's particularly good to see Dossev, probably the Ballet's wittiest comic actor, in a lead role after months of laboring in the corps). 

And they're joined this time around by the Ballet's go-to leading man, Jeffrey Cirio, who makes Frantz's youthful innocence believable, and hangs onto a shining technical finish even through his final cabrioles and double tours.

As for the third-act finale, it seemed to me even more ravishing than it had in 2010.  The luminous Adiarys Almeida elegantly (and effortlessly) wrangled twenty-four adorable little ballerinas in the "Waltz of the Golden Hours" (one beaming little girl for each hour, I guess!), while Rie Ichikawa (whom we don't see enough of these days either) brought an intriguing touch of wistfulness to her invocation of the Dawn. Meanwhile Ashley Ellis and Sylvia Deaton essayed confident, poised turns as Prayer and Spinning (hinting, I suppose, at what Swanilda can look forward to in married life).  But the surprise of the evening was that Balanchine's wackiest gambit, the over-the-top "battle" between "War" and "Discord" that interrupts the wedding like a summer storm, proved one of the most compelling moments in the performance.  Lia Cirio and Lasha Khozashvili seemed unfazed by their wild costumes (which as I've said before look like something Cher might wear to the Oscars) and brought off a delightfully athletic - and competitive - gambol, with spears held relentlessly (if somewhat ridiculously) aloft.  Then Frantz and Swanilda returned for their own triumphant variations, which when you're talking about Jeffrey Cirio and Misa Kuranaga basically means a face-off between two dancers whose peerless technique is always sourced in emotions that poor, mechanical Coppélia could never match.

A belated fanfare for the Ballet's "Next Generation"

The dancers and players of Fanfare - photo: Rosalie O'Connor.

I've been meaning to post a note about the Boston Ballet's "Next Generation" performance of almost two weeks ago (!), which probably counts as the most fun I've had at a dance concert in some time - or at least since the last "Next Generation" concert. This year, as always, the opening Les Passages sequence was adorable, and gave everyone a chance to show off what they can do, even though one or two students took a spill (as one or two students do every year, don't sweat it guys).  I was encouraged to see that once again it seemed more boys were making a serious commitment to dance; gone are the days when an ocean of young ballerinas had to be organized around only a handful of teen danseurs.

The contributions from Boston Ballet II were likewise compelling, although the excerpts from Jorma Elo's Lost by Last, alas, seemed a bit blurry; far more finished was the climactic pas de deux from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, here essayed by rising talents Dawn Atkins and Marcus Romeo. Both are elegant dancers, and both all but gleamed in their roles as Aurora and Prince Désiré. Mr. Romeo did seem to tire slightly, however, over the course of his solos, while Ms. Atkins seemed to only move from strength to strength in an elegant tour de force that was remarkable in a dancer so young.

I have to admit that the Ballet saved the best for last, however, with Jerome Robbins' captivating Fanfare, set to Britten's justly famous The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (itself a brilliant set of variations on a theme by Purcell), narrated with professorial bemusement by New England Conservatory's own Tony Woodcock - and played with confidence and freedom by the Conservatory's orchestra (under the baton of the Ballet's Jonathan McPhee).

The choreography was likewise delightful - Robbins organizes squads of dancers (all in fanciful unitards, with the instrument they represent emblazoned on their chests) into a kind of balletic half-time show that's never less than charming and sometimes flat-out hilarious.  And the Ballet's Next Generation danced it to the hilt, with just the right kind of tongue-in-cheek aplomb.  (The Percussion crew in particular - Beau Fisher, Andres Garcia, and Christopher Scruggs - put the audience into stitches with their deadpan slapstick.) The work's final fugue proved quite dazzling in its complexity, and wrapped the evening with a rousing burst of energy.  The crowd enthusiastically rose to their feet at the finale - proud parents, beaming dance fans, and even a few giggling critics among them.  And as the lights went up on the house, the future of dance looked bright indeed.

Thornton among the dinosaurs

I don't often catch student efforts, but I was intrigued by BU's recent production (it closed last weekend) of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, an extravaganza seen about as often as the prehistoric fauna that romp through its first act.  Indeed, I've only seen the script fully mounted once before, almost thirty years ago - for reasons obvious (mammoths and dinosaurs are required, along with a tidal wave and a glacier) and not-so-obvious (more on that later). In short, it's the kind of script you almost have to turn to students these days to see at all; and so its appearance at BU felt like the perfect cap to a local season largely given over to Wilder on stages both large (the award-winning Our Town) and small (the intriguing Little Giants).

Alas, the production (directed by BU éminence grise Sidney Friedman) slightly disappointed - which probably shouldn't have surprised me. On Broadway, it's true, it was a hit, but that was during wartime (it's about crisis, and depends on a crisis atmosphere) and with people like Tallulah Bankhead, Frederic March, and Montgomery Clift in the leads. Not that the kids at BU weren't talented - they were. But only two actors were exactly right for their roles, and others went wrong in ways that made me wonder if the culture isn't closed off to much of Wilder's curious meditation on human history.

There is, of course, a sense of timelessness hanging over his biggest success, Our Town - and questions of divine purpose likewise loom over the novel that put him on the map, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder clearly had his eye on the long view (even the juvenilia of Little Giants hinted as much) and hence the cyclical "plot" of The Skin of Our Teeth stretches for eons, and mashes together the Ice Age, Noah's Flood, and World War II with something like the arch tone of a caveman cartoon in The New Yorker (or, if your prefer upper-lowbrow to lower-highbrow, an episode of The Flintstones).


This tells you that in one way Wilder's concept is almost too simple: he follows the travails of the archetypal Antrobus family (anthropology + omnibus, get it?) as they encounter the threats to human existence that have recurred in various forms throughout history. But as if self-conscious about the artifice of this gambit, the author embeds his action in a welter of postmodern frames, breaks "the fourth wall" repeatedly, and finishes off the whole thing with a direct lift from Finnegans Wake (the audience is supposed to exit the theatre as the play returns to the top of its cycle, to continue on forever, like the dreams of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker).

If all these high-low/low-high cultural contrasts sound like too much for the bookwormish Wilder to bring off - well, there are many who agree with you. But I have a soft spot in my heart for The Skin of Our Teeth, probably because in its modern-lite way it treats questions that few dramatists have ever attempted to answer - the persistence of human evil probably being first among them (the Antrobus scion, Henry, was formerly known as Cain - so you know what happened to his elder brother). Indeed, I'd argue that beneath the script's Thurber-ish surface, there are very dark (and yes eternal) conflicts roiling; the trick for any production is to suggest them beneath all Wilder's parlor-game wit and twee quotation.

And at least two of the Boston University actors managed to do just that. Lorne Batman made a polished, genteelly steely Mrs. Antrobus (although she could have hinted at even more ferocity when saving the bad seed in her brood). And as Cain/Henry, Sam Tilles found a believable arc from spoiled, impulsive brat to - well - Hitler. Wilder's other conceptions of human character seemed to confound the young cast, however. His Mr. Antrobus - inventor of the wheel, serial adulterer, and silent mourner of the lost Abel - is built of a long series of suppressions, culminating in something close to despair, but there was little sympathy for (or comprehension of) his slow-burning fuse at BU. Likewise the author's polyglot temptress, Lily Sabina - whose name derives from two competing legends of femininity, the sexual demon Lilith, and the rape victims known as the Sabine women - seemed to flummox the relentlessly sex-positive mindset of the cast. To them, the very idea that sexual temptation could be a dishonest snare seemed alien, and apparently director Friedman didn't know what to do about that.

Of course perhaps the eternally closeted Wilder is himself a dinosaur - wrong about sex, as well as the nature of men and women (certainly his "timeless" domestic arrangements seem quite dated). Then again, perhaps modernity is in denial regarding a few basic facts about the species, and we ignore Wilder's wisdom at our peril (certainly the climate change crisis is reminiscent of his Ice Age scenario). At any rate, the production did showcase some outstanding, resourceful design by BU students. Costumer Chelsea Kerl actually pulled off a winsome dinosaur and mammoth (amusingly mimed by Zoe Silberblatt and Grace Woodward), and Courtney Nelson imaginatively evoked not only the collapsing Antrobus homestead, but also Atlantic City avant le déluge, and even the war-torn Western Front, helped immensely by Katy Atwell's lighting and Yi-Chun Hung's sound. Clearly if the cultural cycle ever returns to The Skin of Our Teeth, the technical talent is out there to put Wilder's vision over.

Mamet's masterpiece lights up Merrimack

David Adkins, Todd Licea and Joel Colodner in Glengarry Glen Ross.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

The Merrimack Rep is perhaps our leading example of a great theatre constrained by its budget. They consistently operate in the black, and enjoy a great deal of support from their community (indeed, up in Merrimack you feel an extraordinary bond between the theatre and its audience, closer and more trusting than just about anywhere else).  But you can also feel in their season, which is typically devoted to small-cast plays, a sense of financial (and hence to some degree artistic) limits. This perception is particularly acute given the fact that their "big" play each season is so reliably terrific. One guesses that with only a little more funding, Merrimack could mount seasons that would consistently rival, and possibly eclipse, the best being done on the regional landscape.

Certainly Glengarry Glen Ross (through this weekend only) is the most powerful show currently on the local boards.  It's true I've never seen David Mamet's balls-out potboiler fail; given a competent cast, its nasty mix of coiled masculine anxiety, frustration, and aggression always grips.  After all, it's practically an X-ray of the power dynamics of the locker room, where the stakes are always high, and the men always naked (at least metaphorically).

What's more, alas, the script also makes one reminisce for the days before Mamet lost his mind to the sort of political and sexual paranoias one would associate with a denizen of one of his shark tanks. For Glengarry is not only perhaps this playwright's greatest play, it's also his last great play; in his next major effort, Speed-the-Plow, he crossed over from sympathy with his bad boys to literal identification with them. Women became the Enemy, and thus the ironic finale of Glengarry, which dashes any hope of honor among his masculine thieves, would prove the last of its kind in the playwright's oeuvre.

But at least we have director Charles Towers, and the cast at Merrimack (which is far better than competent), to remind us how electrifying the playwright once was. You could argue, I suppose, that this Glengarry plays everything by the book - but to my mind that only underlines the fact that, as the culture really moves so slowly these days, the play's constructs still feel up-to-the-minute. Mamet's men are stripped of any connection to society at large, much less the other sex. They seem to exist in a vacuum, and even their sales prowess is somehow evanescent; it's a skill - or a potency - that has no physical basis (it can evaporate at a customer's whim). Thus these men are only men when they believe they're men, and so their emotional predicament in a way feels timeless (even if the sums of money in play clearly date the script).

David Adkins and Will Lebow make a deal.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

They are, of course, not only near-tragic figures but snakes-in-the-swampgrass as well. As mentioned earlier, part of what makes Glengarry so much more bracing than later Mamet is that it's so unsentimental about the dishonesty and back-stabbing moving behind the solemn cult of masculinity. Mamet's real estate gods - so seemingly concerned with admiration and trust - are constantly cheating on the down low; their very livelihood, in fact, is based on proverbial Florida swampland. (Which may be why the play was at first misinterpreted as a critique of capitalism.)

Fortunately the cast at Merrimack is all but expert at floating between these opposed identities and moral poles - and their command of the famously staccato "Mamet-speak" (here at its hilarious height) is virtuosic.  As cocky top salesdog Ricky Roma, Todd Licea exudes a more open sense of predatory Las-Vegas charisma than usual, but he so smoothly manipulates each and every social transaction that his sales success is utterly convincing.  Ditto for Will LeBow's desperate Shelly Levene, a kind of lizard on his last legs who alternates between claims of prowess (he was once known as "The Machine") and pathetically low compromises, deals - and even thefts.

These two superb actors supply the engine of Mamet's own machine, but there are several remarkable performances elsewhere in the production. Merrimack mainstay David Adkins gives his Williamson (the shop boss, in effect) a stronger shot of alienation than callow slime, but he's intriguing all the same. Meanwhile Jeremiah Wiggins is just about perfect as the shop's latest mark, and Jim Ortlieb makes the aging, bumbling Aaronow a figure of true pathos.  I was only dissatisfied with Charlie Kevin's Moss, who had less of a hidden edge than I think the character demands - but after the play's opening gambit, his is a minor role.

In its look and feel, the physical production is likewise just right - from the blood-red backdrop of the Chinese restaurant to the cheap, off-white gypsum board of the burgled office (thank you, designer Bill Clarke).  All in all, Towers and company have practically built a time machine on the Merrimack stage (even the salesmen's 80's-era ethnic slurs have been preserved, along with the c-word, and a deluge of other profanity).  It all brings us back to the days when Mamet was a playwright of promise, and still had the talent (and self-awareness) to grip you by the lapels - and not let go.

Jephtha resurrected at Handel and Haydn

Harry Christophers leads Jephtha in Disney Hall. Photo: Brian van der Brug, Los Angeles Times.

I'm late with an appreciation of Handel and Haydn's stunning performance of Jephtha, Handel's final oratorio (and one of his greatest). I heard it over a week ago, in fact; but frankly, its impact still lingers.  Indeed, in some ways this Jephtha may have been the finest hour of artistic director Harry Christopher's already-remarkable tenure; it was a model of internalized tragic emotion expressed with exquisite musical poise.  And certainly it marked the most impressive roster of soloists I have yet seen grace the Society's stage - at last they have the people up front to match the people in back, i.e., their by-now-legendary chorus. This version also hinted at the overwhelming importance of rehearsal time - and, actually, performance time; Boston heard Jephtha only after it had toured the West Coast (including a touchdown at Disney Hall, above), and the consequent coherence and depth of the Society's interpretation was noted by many.

Certainly Jephtha deserves the extra attention. It has largely slipped from the active repertory (the Society itself hadn't performed it since 1867!), I suppose because it boasts only a few show-stoppers (although at least one aria, the ravishing "Waft her, angels, thro' the skies" is often heard in recitals, and others should be).  The oratorio makes up for its lack of superficial fireworks, however, in subtlety, dramatic insight, and (for lack of a better word) sheer profundity.  It tells the story of the Old Testament hero Jephtha (although the story is an archetypal one, and appears in many cultures), who rashly promises Yahweh that if he prevails in battle, he will sacrifice the first thing to meet his eyes upon his return.  That thing, of course, turns out to be his only daughter, the beloved Iphis.

Hence submission to the cruel demands of inscrutable Fate (be it of Jewish, Christian, or any other persuasion) forms the terrible crux of Jephtha.  And in an added twist of musical fate, Handel himself was struck down by affliction during its composition - his vision began to fail due to a botched cataract operation, and his original manuscript bears testament to a long pause after the completion of "How dark, o Lord, are thy decrees"(ironically enough) with the heartbreaking note, in the master's handwriting, "Unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye."

Handel did, however, eventually complete the score - and even conducted its premiere in Covent Garden.  Perhaps an angel intervened, as one does in the Jephtha libretto (by Rev. Thomas Morrell), which deviates from the Old Testament in explicitly granting poor Iphis a reprieve from death, if she dedicates her virginity to God.

Joélle Harvey, a talent to watch

Perhaps it should have been unsurprising, then, that the "find" of the concert turned out to be its Iphis, Joélle Harvey (right), a young soprano who is undoubtedly on the cusp of a major career (indeed, H&H has already signed her for a return engagement next year).  Ms. Harvey's tone is of  almost unbelievably luminous purity - a good thing, too, as many of her arias are utterly exposed - and even at the top of her register she can waft a vocal line thro' the skies at something close to a whisper.  Ms. Harvey also proved a subtle dramatic actress, and was able to convincingly convey both her love for her betrothed, Hamon, and her contradictory willingness to sacrifice herself for the sake of Israel.  Hers was a performance to remember.

Only a small step behind was mezzo Catherine Wyn-Rogers as Storgè, Iphis' mother, who skillfully hinted at sorrowful portents early on, and then was absolutely riveting as she desperately begged for her daughter's life (Wyn-Rogers is also coming back next season, I'm happy to report).  Meanwhile, in the title role, tenor Robert Murray was less commanding, oddly, than his wife or daughter, but his Jephtha, though perhaps an unconvincing warrior, nevertheless grew on me as the character's psychological torment increased. Indeed, Mr. Murray's almost-intellectual interpretation proved, in the end, quite harrowing; particularly in the famous recitative "Deeper, and deeper still . . .," his insights into the role mapped well to the sense of introversion latent in the score (which perhaps in turn maps to Handel's own private struggles).

There was still more good news in the supporting roles.  As Iphis' betrothed, Hamor, countertenor William Purefoy proved exquisitely matched to Harvey in their duets, while baritone Woodrow Bynum stepped down from his usual place in the chorus to sing with startling authority as Jepththa's brother Zebul. The reliable Teresa Wakim, another mainstay of the chorale, likewise impressed as the angel who spares Iphis' life. Together these two give some idea of the talent on tap these days in the H&H chorus, which sang - as they always do - with remarkable clarity, utter commitment, and superbly sensitive dynamics. Indeed, now they seem able to communicate complicated moods in a way few choruses can - their reading of the poignant phrase, "Whatever is, is right," for instance, seemed to encompass every interpretation of the line: its frustration and pain seemed locked in a search for triumph through acquiescence, which is precisely the right idea.

Conductor Christophers has a lot to do with all of this, of course - he's a positive genius at sublimating intense emotion within graceful rhetoric (a peculiarly British talent, if you ask me), which makes him perhaps the ideal conductor of Handel.  His Jephtha (which he had carefully edited, btw) seemed perfectly poised between several artistic poles: at times it nodded toward the drama of opera; at others, toward the rhetoric of oratorio - and at still others, toward the private world of internal dialogue.  That Christophers kept these many oppositions in balance, and in organic harmony, was remarkable.  As was the playing of the H&H period instrument orchestra, which has rarely sounded so vibrant or responsive.  The performance was memorable enough that many around me were openly wondering whether this version was to be recorded.  If there are no such plans, there should be; this could be close to a definitive Jephtha.