Susannah is at Leeds Grand Theatre until 22 October, then touring Newcastle, Salford Quays and Nottingham until 21 November. Tom Tollet reviews.
As both operatic composer and impresario in early eighteenth-century London, Handel faced an
annual economic purgatory brought about by the decreed closure of places offering “frivolous”
entertainment during Lent and Eastertide, which left his orchestra, chorus and rented theatre in idle
limbo for its duration.
Though unplanned as an expressive, artistic form and fitful in its development, his needy adoption
and adaptation of the oratorio, edifying story-telling on moralising subjects, proved to be both a
creative and financial lifeline. All manner of music that had poured before from his pen – the
religious, ceremonial and theatrical – was, at every Easter of the 1740s, incorporated into a sublime
distillation of the solemnity and grandeur of the Passion, the uplifting triumph of the anthem and
the vivid narrative and characterisation of opera. No wonder that we still consider Handel to have
been half-German, half-English … and half-Italian! Perhaps, only a genius with this unique musical
pedigree could have brought it off.
Opera North has experienced before the dramatic potential in treating a Handel oratorio as “static
opera”. The composer’s Saul was given in the Company’s 40th-anniversary season, away from Leeds
Grand Theatre, in a semi-staging at Leeds Town Hall. Expected to be eclipsed by the likes of Strauss’
Salomé, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel and the entire Wagner Ring Cycle that they took to the
same venue, the production was a true revelation. If a deserving future can be created for such
unfamiliar works as Susanna, it is surely the theatre, as in Olivia Fuch‘s production here, and not a
church setting, which will provide it.
Susanna is the fourth collaboration between Opera North and Phoenix Dance Company and, as in
the past, the whole evening is a visual and musical delight. Marcus Jarrell Willis‘ contemporary
choreography has the nine dancers, in different groupings assigned to each different principal and
the chorus, engaging the audience with their invigorated interpretation of the unfolding storyline. It
involves clear and fluid depictions of the evolving emotional turmoil far more graphically than words
and music can express alone. It is inspired and all the more effective by virtue of the dancers’ quiet
and, seemingly, effortless deployment.
Zahra Mansouri‘s stage set of a one-shade-of-grey footbridge and Handel’s orchestral sound world,
composed as it is almost entirely of strings, provide simultaneously monochromatic visual and
musical backdrops against which to highlight the principal players in the tale.
The Susanna of Anna Dennis is bathed in Jake Wiltshire‘s saintly spotlight, the young, newly-wedded
Old Testament virtuous wife, vengefully accused of adultery and having to protest her innocence.
Her life depends on her persuasive powers and she sings with an elegant agility, expressive and
stylish. Handel taxes her with some fiendishly difficult vocal runs that she takes at pace with defiant
ease.
Her accusers, the Elders sung by tenor Colin Judson and baritone Karl Huml, may have been
subjected to a more comical treatment in the 18th-century, amorous and amoral, old men in the
ridiculous throes of a late-in-life testosterone surge. With Susanna’s husband, Joacim, absent on
business, both sing with a tonal darkness, purposefully bereft of beauty, befitting their mission to
seduce Susanna and, when rejected and ridiculed, contrive her disgrace. Mr. Huml finds Handel’s
low-register cadences a bit of a challenge, but both have vivid middle ranges that pay sure dividends
in what are surprisingly demanding roles, exalted high-octane exhibitionism wilting to feeble,
shameful exposure. Nevertheless, they follow the composer’s calculated intention not to come
across as an absurd tweedledum and tweedledee.
Susanna and her husband, sung by countertenor James Hall, enjoy beautifully warm and exquisitely
detailed duets in their opening marriage scene and again at their reunion following her acquittal.
Even in sobering oratorio, Handel, it seems, could not pass over the opportunity for a touching,
intoxicating love scene.
There is a devotion, passion and intensity to their singing, which would surely have been the vocal
highlight of the night, were it not for the sheer beauty and luminous lyricism of Claire Lees‘ Daniel, a
trouser-role youth who springs to Susanna’s defence and proves the perjury of her accusers.
Handel’s opening strains, a glorious lament, setting the action in the Babylon of Jewish diaspora, is as
great a beginning harmonically as he ever wrote and its heartbreaking yearning elicits an almost
fathomless despondency and desperation to the exiles’ plight from Opera North’s chorus.
Elsewhere, the ensemble takes on markedly different roles, both within and outside the action, not merely
providing a passing commentary to events on stage. What a wondrous asset they are to any
production.
In the pit, Baroque specialist Johanna Soller had the orchestra alert and eloquently responsive.
Whether it was her decision or Handel’s, the abrupt addition of trumpets to the joyous finale, lovers
united and villains pardoned if not quite forgiven, make the final pages of the score all the more
dazzling.
This is an artistic triumph you must see and hear.
Sung in English, with integrated on-stage BSL signing and off-stage English surtitles.
Main image Dylan Springer and Teige Bisnought from Phoenix Dance Theatre with members of the Chorus of Opera North and (above) Karl Huml as Second Elder, Matthew Brook as Chelsias and Colin Judson as First Elder
Photography by Tristram Kenton.
