25 Brook Street - Oratorio

25 Brook Street - Oratorio

06 July, 2009
by: Alun

25 Brook Street, performed at St. George’s Church

A new oratorio by Mark Bowden, Larry Goves, Christopher Mayo and Charlie Piper.
Libretto by Helen Cooper. Performed by Brindley Sherratt, Thomas Hobbs, Miriam Allan, Laurence Cummings, the Choir of St. George’s and the London Handel Orchestra.

Georg Frideric Handel, once the toast of the London opera scene and a composer/impresario of unprecedented success, is now a blind septuagenarian, reduced to dictating his final oratorio to an assistant. As he does so, he is haunted by visions of his former selves, reminding him of his youthful arrogance and the personal sacrifices he had to make in order to satisfy his muse. His greatest achievements behind him, he is faced with a future that promises only inexorable decline and death.

This is the premise of 25 Brook Street, a new oratorio that takes its name from the house in which the composer lived for the final quarter-century of his life. It is not a cheerful work. Nor does it have much time for the mythic figure of popular musical history: the larger-than-life showman who wrote grand operas and coronation anthems, and who staged performances in his own home, selling tickets from the windows. Instead, there is Handel the introspective invalid, whose image (‘dripping with fat, a hog, a pig’) is abhorrent to his younger self, just as his past ruthlessness is to him.

There’s nothing wrong with slaughtering sacred cows of course (figurative ones, anyway), but it helps if the meat is more nourishing than the myth. Unfortunately, 25 Brook Street doesn’t have much to add but morbidity. This is largely a musical problem: an atmosphere of queasy stasis, presumably intended to impart a dreamlike ambience, envelopes the proceedings. The chorus spends much of its time generating a woozy sound-cloud, from which the soloists appear to call out like people lost in fog, and while the orchestra occasionally threatens to burst through by injecting a hint of rhythmic urgency, its efforts are hampered by a lack of crispness in execution. 

Of all the characters, only Old Handel is able to distinguish himself, and this is primarily by virtue of his moroseness. The bass singer rarely strays from his bottom register, and many of his phrases are lugubrious monotones—the opening recitative is probably the most sluggish I’ve ever heard. Appropriate as this may be, given the character’s depressed mental state, it means that listening to him is less than a joy.

Given all of this, it’s no surprise that 25 Brook Street fails to turn the revelation of Handel’s human frailty into a source of pathos. Instead, it presents a spectacle of relentless dourness, arguably a reactionary response to the composer’s relatively cheerful legend. When he vows to give himself ‘in all ways and forever’ to his muse, it’s hard not to think of Faust, and that’s a strange tribute for one of England’s most beloved musicians. But then, this is the 250th anniversary of his death, after all.


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Alun