Acis And Galatea Concert Review
The musical works of George Frideric Handel have had a profound and far-reaching influence on the history of music in the Baroque period. Among these musical works, Acis and Galatea has an important reach value. The concert production has divided the music of the four roles in Acis and Galatea between twelve vocal soloists. The instrumental ensemble includes strings, woodwinds and harpsichord. Acis and Galatea is a large scale musical drama performed in English. It has been positioned as a serenata, masque, pastoral opera as well as oratorio in various documents.
As mentioned above, the proper genre of Acis and Galatea described in numerous of documents is vague, and even Handle himself did not make specification in his original score. However, the most notable feature of this play, pastoral, could be found in both of the original version and University of Toronto’s performance of Acis and Galatea. In terms of the music and text, both words and music use the conventions of the Italianate pastoral, especially throughout the first section. The first chorus “The pleasure of the plains” comes in directly after the overture, the word “happy” was emphasised among five voices, creates a nice picture of joyful life and free from the corruption.
In term of the instrumentation, it is a common method to express the pastoral scenery and imitating singing of birds through the use of recorders. The instrumentation in Handel’s works has been always known for strings. But different in this work, I noticed that the recorder always appears in accompaniment of Galatea’s arias, a more outstanding performance appears in the aria Hush, ye pretty warbling quire, solo recorder plays the main melody of the accompaniment imitating birds singing and also plays parts of Galatea's melody creates an echo-like affect repeating Galatea’s singing, which express and highlighting Galatea's longing for love. While reading through the scoreI noticed that there are neither clear tempo markings nor dynamic signs in the score. The ensemble selected a moderately fast tempo and approached the ending with a ritardando and added a trill which it’s in accordance with the style of Handel.
In terms of lyrics, pastoral drama is commonly using poetry, in aria O ruddier than the cherry, lyricism is dominant, which appears in praising the beauty of Galatea in a comparable way in verses, the frequent use of interjections and highly poetic tones by the performer. These techniques are the most common in pastoral poetry and are used extensively in early pastoral dramas.
Even though pastoral opera is not an existing terminology to define music genre, Acis and Galatea can not be defined as pastoral drama. The essence of the pastoral drama is poetry rather than music or drama. The emotion of the love of nature is what the writer appeals, and music is only set to match the emotions. Different in Acis and Galatea, music, is in the absolute dominant position. Therefore, the term pastoral drama is clearly unsuitable to describe Acis and Galatea, and the choice of using pastoral opera in the concert program is more accurate.
The ensemble made their own arrangement of the performance by adding props and acting while singing the music, such as a plastic ball, which leaves the audience to have their own interpretation of what are they symbolizing. For instance, in the first chorus The pleasure of the plains all the singers formed a circle and walking around in one direction and tossed a ball to each other. It can be explained simply as having fun time by playing, or can also be identified the joy and love they share to each other. The ensemble engaged an audience who might not be as familiar with the work by helped keeping the audience interested, the structure of concert site allows singers to perform through walking in front, back and middle of the audience, without only performing in one distanced position throughout the concert. It also allowed the audience able to follow along with the concert notes, which provided some level of background knowledge about the work and the style and lyrics of every piece. Also, the transition between performers was smooth and quiet.
I found this concert very different than the other classical opera concert I usually attend. There is no conductor in this concert, instead, they have the music director who also plays the violin gives instructions like pick ups and cuts and he performed by standing and stands beside other sitting string players throughout the entire concert. It is a very unique and unforgettable experience.
