APTLY enough, perhaps, Handel’s Hercules calls for a herculean effort from performers and audience alike. Airing the work as the climax of his “Handel in Oxford” festival, Harry Christophers trimmed the 1744 oratorio down to three hours, which doesn’t seem unreasonable — except that it was performed in the Sheldonian. It’s an appropriate venue in one sense (the last remaining building for which Handel wrote an oratorio), but has the sort of audience benches that put iron in the soul and a severe cramp everywhere else.
That didn’t matter in those bits where Handel’s inspiration is white-hot with chromatic anguish. It mattered a great deal in the rather more numerous passages seemingly composed on auto-pilot.
The story tells of the war hero Hercules’s return from battle, his wife Dejanira’s misplaced jealousy (she thinks he fancies one of his captives, the Princess Iole), her attempt to rekindle his love with a magic cloak, and the disastrous result — the cloak being not magic (cloaks rarely are), but poisoned. What clearly gripped Handel was her psychological disintegration. So for Hercules to work, even in the concert hall, it needs a performance of mesmerising intensity from the mezzo singing that role.
Sadly, Susan Bickley never came within a mile of that. Eyes too often fixed on her score, she conveyed nothing except the dots on the page. Not good enough, especially from a singer from whom one expects so much. The contrast with James Gilchrist’s flamingly vivid portrayal of Hercules’s son Hyllus, or the way that the towering young American bass Eric Owens seized on the melodramatic possibilities of the title role, especially in his raging death scene, was far too striking for comfort.
I also admired Gillian Keith’s lively delivery of Iole’s arias, with their fearsome semiquaver runs. The Canadian soprano has always had an agile technique; now there is much more colour in the voice and character in the interpretation.
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Christophers’s choir, The Sixteen, seized avidly on its few chances to inject some contrapuntal fervour into proceedings, especially in the wonderfully woeful chorus Jealousy! Infernal Pest. The orchestra, the Symphony of Harmony and Invention, played neatly enough — and, in the last three minutes, stole the show, when antique horns (one left-handed, one right) from the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments were brought out to add a few festive whoops to the finale. But the most heartfelt whoops were when we all escaped to stretch our legs.