As the fugal section of the overture drew to its close, I felt myself thinking: they won’t play the Minuet. They didn’t. How did I know? Well, there was something about the temper of the sombre opening and the fugue that made me realise that this was not a performance to put up with anything quite as frivolous as a minuet (even a rather sad little one in G minor) in a profound and serious work. Yes, this is a performance to emphasise the profound and the serious; and that, as usual, proves to be self-defeating.
Tempos are nearly all slow. The bass is heavily marked out, though it is not given very much functional shaping. The chorus sing strongly, with warm and rounded tone, and firm lines; several of the choral numbers are very impressive, for example the Part 1 chorus ‘O God, behold our sore distress’, which has considerable grandeur. I was faintly disappointed, though, in the marvellous chorus that ends Part 2, one of Handel’s noblest, ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees, all hid from human sight’ (his blindness overcame him as he wrote it) – it is well enough sung but too sluggish in tempo and has no real sense of movement or of the stark inevitability of God’s laws. Yet some of the quicker choruses are done with real vigour and confidence, for example ‘When his loud voice’ and the jubilant final ones. The extremely resonant church recording perhaps enriches the sound of the choir, but doesn’t, I’m afraid, cover the deficiencies in the orchestra, which is hearty but unpolished and sometimes a bit rough. Even so the conductor, Jurgen Budday, does draw some buoyant rhythms from them in the faster music.
The strongest inducement to buy this set, then, lies in the loveliness of Emma Kirkby’s singing. This is no longer the exquisite, delicate thread of sound that it once was, but it is still exquisite and delicate while being much fuller and richer, and her characterisation of Iphis, the daughter of Jephtha who ‘must a victim fall’ because of his ‘impious vow’ to sacrifice the first person he encounters after victory. Listen to her wonderfully shapely and natural singing of ‘Tune the soft melodious lute’, for example, or ‘Farewell, ye limpid springs and floods’, as she movingly welcomes death. Alas! two of her songs, the charming bourree ‘The smiling dawn’ and her final air, are among the numbers omitted (the work is packed onto two generously filled discs, at the expense of some half-dozen items).
Storge is sung with adequate strength and clarity by Melinda Paulsen (who also does the Angel air in Part 3). Regrettably, the role is deprived of one item, the important foreboding F minor air, ‘Scenes of horror’. Jephtha himself is well taken by Julian Podger, a very capable singer, but wanting the authority of tone and manner that the music needs. Perhaps he is too young. He is at his best in the heroic music, such as ‘His mighty arm’; but the horror of ‘Open thy marble jaws, O tomb’ escapes him (possibly it is too slow and placid), and he lacks the weight needed in the great quartet, while the depths of grief demanded by the famous ‘Deeper and deeper still’ and ‘Waft her angels’ are not at present in his repertory: the performance does not go beyond good singing. Zebul is warmly and sensitively sung by Stephen Varcoe, who also sings the role in the set cited above. Charles Humphries provides an able Hamor, duetting gracefully with Emma Kirkby in two numbers.
The set comes in an economy pack, with no libretto or notes. Its outstanding feature, the artistry of Emma Kirkby, cannot justify preferring it as a version of one of Handel’s greatest oratorios to the much fuller version under Gardiner, one of his finest achievements, with a powerful cast including Lynne Dawson, Michael Chance and Anne Sofie von Otter, with Nigel Robson a profoundly moving Jephtha