Recording of the Week, Handel's Theodora from Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d'Oro

Theodora has had a special place in my heart ever since I stumbled across a DVD of Peter Sellars’s controversial but brilliant Glyndebourne staging from the late 1990s, setting Handel’s depiction of intolerance and religious persecution in present-day America and with Dawn Upshaw as the Christian heroine condemned to sex-slavery by a tyrannical Roman governor determined to stamp out ‘heresy’ amongst his subjects. Today’s starrily-cast new studio recording from Maxim Emelyanychev is scarcely less vivid, and offers a wealth of fresh insights on several levels.

A celebrated Violetta and Manon, Lisette Oropesa brings a fuller, warmer sound to the title-role than many of her predecessors, and it makes for an interesting perspective on the character: one senses that this Theodora has had a harder time than many in bidding farewell to the ‘fond, flattering world’ of luxury, and that her ‘boasted chastity’ doesn’t preclude real flesh-and-blood passion for her Roman lover Didymus.

Likewise, Joyce DiDonato’s fierce Irene is worlds away from the stoic, other-worldly serenity which Lorraine Hunt Lieberson famously brought to the role for Sellars. Irene’s early homily upbraiding the evils of ‘prosperity’ is delivered with the fanaticism of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and the lengthy, often rather outlandish cadenzas (one over a minute long) suggest a mind on the verge of breaking with reality; the recording took place before she sang the role in Katie Mitchell’s recent production at Covent Garden, where Irene was portrayed as a terrorist ring-leader, but DiDonato already sounds fully attuned to the character’s darker side here.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the presence of the shape-shifting Michael Spyres as fence-sitting Roman Septimius, an assignment he undertook just a few weeks after making his role-debut as Beethoven’s Florestan and not long before essaying Act II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. But there’s never any sense of trying to fit a quart into a pint-pot, and those forays into heavier repertoire certainly haven’t compromised his vocal agility (try his breakneck ‘Dread the fruits of Christian folly’ for size) or ability to float long lines on the merest thread of sound in the achingly beautiful ‘Descend, kind pity’. As his ruthless boss Valens, John Chest is no pantomime villain but an astute politician whose polish and plausibility render him all the more chilling; a dark baritone rather than a bass, his excursions up to top As and even a B flat in moments of anger give Spyres a run for his money in the baritenor stakes.

There’s been much gnashing of teeth in certain quarters regarding the absence of Erato’s star countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński (who sang Didymus in that Covent Garden production) from the cast-list, and certainly the Frenchman Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian offers a very different take on the role: whereas Orliński’s purity of tone worked hand-in-glove with Mitchell’s characterisation of the Roman soldier as a fresh-faced intern championing diversity and inclusion in an environment which values neither, Bénos-Djian’s rather more lived-in sound suggests a hard-bitten fighter who knows he’s beaten before he begins.

The low-lying role sits well for him, and he never sounds less than wholly invested in the text's meaning, but it’s often all too evident that he’s the only non-Anglophone singer in the cast: someone on the team really should’ve pointed out that ‘the raptur’d soul defies [rather than ‘defy’] the sword’ in his opening aria, especially given how often the phrase recurs, and it’s surprising that slips like ‘princes’ for ‘princess’ weren’t ironed out before the recording.

No such issues with the small but perfectly-formed Il Pomo d’Oro chorus: the list of names in the booklet suggests all but one of the sixteen singers are Italians, yet the clarity and incisiveness of their diction throughout is such that you’d take them for native speakers, whether they’re spitting out gleeful invective as sadistic Romans or spinning out the long lines of Christian prayers.

Il Pomo d’Oro play out of their boots for Emelyanychev, whose occasional interjections from the harpsichord are always illuminating rather than intrusive, and the strings in particular sound entirely inside the drama: witness those rasping open Es which punctuate Valens’s fanatical pronouncements in ‘Racks, gibbets, sword and fire’. The odd caveat notwithstanding, there’s much to surprise and delight here.