Why the L.A. Phil's Handel festival was downright revelatory

Los Angeles Times

01-04-2025

In 1707 George Frideric Handel, a 22-year-old radical composer working in Rome, startled the Vatican and the public with 'Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno' (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion). An opera disguised as an oratorio to get around the church's ban on profane opera, the impolitic work about past and present is formed as the conflict between extravagance and sanctity. Humanizing our obsession with beauty and obligation for council, Handel's early masterpiece comes across as timely as it is titillating.
Exactly 240 years later, another radical 22-year-old, Pierre Boulez, began his Second Piano Sonata. This wild and impolitic work startled civilized Parisian salons with what sounded like sheer ugliness. Yet it took a sonata this complex and aggressive to seed the European post-World War II avant-garde and provide a basis for music that headed in new directions.
Boulez, who died nine years ago, would have been 100 last Wednesday. Among the universal celebrations of his work this season, a young and appropriately wild pianist with a taste for death metal, Thomas Mellan, impressively captured the aggression of Boulez's Second Sonata on the composer's birthday as part of the Piano Spheres series at the Colburn School. The next night, across the street at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic presented 'Il Trionfo' to conclude a groundbreaking weeklong Handel Project, the first installment of French conductor and harpsichordist Emmanuelle Haïm's new three-year role as the orchestra's artist collaborator.
What are the odds of these rare works showing up back to back? Very great in most places but less surprising here. Boulez had close ties with Piano Spheres founder Leonard Stein (who gave the first L.A. performance of the Second Sonata in 1963) and with the L.A. Phil (which will be celebrating Boulez next month).
In her own right, Haïm has broken Baroque barriers. She made an arresting L.A. Phil debut in 2011, bringing an uninhibited lustiness to Handel, and with each successive appearance she has caused the Baroque to seem increasingly modern, almost as unpredictable and changeable as Boulez. Her appointment of artist collaborator follows that of opera director Yuval Sharon, who was better known as an artistic disruptor, a designation equally well suited to Haïm.
Nine years ago, Haïm was the conductor in a highly provocative staging of 'Il Trionfo' at the summer Aix-en-Provence festival that included a filmed clip of the French theorist Jacques Derrida, who was sometimes accused of doing to literary studies what Boulez had done to music, and vice versa. Haïm furthermore recorded 'Il Trionfo' back in 2004 at IRCAM, the computer music institute Boulez created in Paris.
Haïm framed 'Il Trionfo' at Disney Hall with singular brilliance. Her Handel Project included three programs. For regular L.A. Phil subscription concerts the weekend of March 21-23, she conducted Bach's Magnificat and Handel's 'Dixit Dominus.' This was followed by two programs with Haïm's own ravishing period instrument ensemble, Le Concert d'Astrée. These consisted of a Rameau/Handel program, studies in luxuriant sonorities. 'Il Trionfo' came last. The L.A. Phil, sparing little expense, also flew over Haïm's 25-member d'Astrée choir from Paris along with eight extraordinary vocal soloists.
Handel's 'Dixit Dominus,' which was composed the same year as 'Il Trionfo' and began Haïm's L.A. Phil program, set the scene. It too is boldly operatic, especially for a sacred work. It avoids scandal, though, by being a seductive joy to hear and by not undertaking the riskier human desires of 'Il Trionfo.' At Disney Hall it offered unalloyed joy. Haïm's virtuosic d'Astrée choir dazzled. The L.A. Phil gave the best approximation of playing period instruments I've encountered. With Bach's Magnificat and an encore of 'Happy, Happy Shall We Be' from Handel's 'Semele,' 'Dixit Dominus' made sure that happiness prevailed. Wonderful smiles all around, on stage and off.
In the next concert March 25, Handel's 'Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,' a setting of poetry by John Dryden, took even fewer risks, at least for anyone with a love for music. The 'Ode' celebrates in exalted song and irresistibly vivid instrumental invention, the wonder of music in all its processes and measures. Handel delights in the blaring trumpet, the warbling flute, the miracle of harmony, the capacity of music to tame the savage beast and offer revelations of the beyond. Haïm seemed to have one instruction for her ensemble chorus and her soloists, soprano Elsa Benoit and tenor Eric Ferring: Find, in every utterance, ever more happiness.
This emotionally upbeat preparation made 'Il Trionfo' appear all the more revolutionary with its allowances for disrupting musical formulas as well as psychological ones. Coping with truth and disillusion caused Handel to return again and again to the work over half a century, rewriting it twice (the last time at the end of his life) as the mature and stately 'The Triumph of Time and Truth.' Even so, it is the freshness of allegorical audacity as a young genius looks ahead that has the most relevance.
The characters are Beauty, Pleasure, Time and Disillusion. Beauty is young and vain. Pleasure assures her that she can stay that way, so she might as well live it up as long as she can. Time says not so fast. Disillusion warns her that the road to salvation is to face the facts. It takes her 2 ½ stubborn hours to finally follow Disillusion.
But Pleasure cannot be defeated. She's ready for the next victim. She lives for the moment and will not let it go. Time and Disillusion remain abstractions up to the point when we dare no longer fool ourselves.
Haïm's inspired singers — Benoit (Beauty), Julia Lezhneva (Pleasure), Iestyn Davies (Disillusion) and Petr Nekoranec (Time) — each gave a convincing arguments. Pleasure is often presented as a sleazy male operator. Lezhneva's enthralling Pleasure acted as a kind of ghost, a haunted wanderer seeking her own validation rather than victims.
Handel wrote for Pleasure one of his most famous and moving arias, 'Lascia la spina.' Leave the thorn, Pleasure utters in lament, take the rose. Handel reused it later in his opera 'Renaldo.' Haïm moved the Thursday performance along with an intensity that didn't allow any room for applauding arias. The stunning impact of Lezhneva's 'Lascia' was the sound of a large audience withholding gasps of awe.
There is little equal in music to 22-year-old disruptors on the level of Handel and Boulez. We are in an age of gleeful disruption, particularly as we witness Silicon Valley strategies and the tearing down of the federal government. Handel and Boulez revealed a different strategy. Both may have been aggressive in their demands that the world be ready for a new direction. But they tore down worn-out classical structures in which they were deeply schooled, knowing already what worked and what needed replacement. They took the next step anticipating where the new freedom would take them. Both spent the next half century developing ideas they initiated in these two early works, making them matter, as they still do.