Oratorio, musicians shine in Bach opener

By Grant Menzies for The Register-Guard.

His earliest work may be pushing the three-century mark, but the music of George Frideric Handel always has something timeless and topical to say - especially for the present hour: His final oratorio, Jephtha, based on the story of the Israelite general in Judges 11, offers a last word on the unpredictably high price of war. Having sworn to Jehovah that if he grants the Israelites victory over the Ammonites, he will sacrifice the first person he meets, Jephtha is faced with a parent's ultimate sacrifice when it is his daughter, Iphis, who comes to greet him after his return from the battle.

The Old Testament boasts few happy endings, but to satisfy the conventions of Greek-influenced drama, where gods could be lowered during crises to solve the insoluble, Handel's librettist allowed Iphis (not named in the Bible) to survive through divine intervention. This cheerful Baroque revision, which adds such characters as Storgè, Jephtha's wife and Hamor, Iphis' love interest, blunts some of the original tale's remorseless irony. But thanks to Handel's superb grasp of theater, its stirring pathos remains. In fact, if pressed to confess what impressed me most about Friday night's performance at the Hult Center, the first offering of the 34th Oregon Bach Festival, I would have difficulty choosing between the oratorio itself and the stellar musicians who brought it to life. As I'm sure many among the rather sparse Silva Concert Hall audience would agree, Jephtha is a masterpiece by any standard, Handel's included.

One part of its beauty lies in the way the composer - aging, going blind - had the chutzpah to use all the ingenious methods learned over a lifetime in the theater to transform the Rev. Thomas Morrell's lackluster libretto into a stage work as gripping and beautiful as his most brilliant operas. The score is rich with arias depicting in a few phrases all the basic underpinnings of character and motivation, spare but evocative musical interludes, and choruses every bit as sinewy and thrilling as anything in Messiah, including one, "They now contract their bois'trous pride," which is one big laugh in the Ammonites' faces.

The other part, of course, had to do with Friday's marvelous team of soloists. Soprano Elizabeth Keusch sketched a sweetly guileless Iphis, while golden-toned alto Anke Vondung, as Storgè, painted a moving portrait of a mother's love and pain. Countertenor Matthew White, singing the role of Iphis' love Hamor, showed off his plummy middle and silvery upper ranges to perfection. As Jephtha's half-brother Zebul, bass Sanford Sylvan made up for a lack of authority with plenty of handsome nuance. Soprano Michele DeBoer, singing from one of the hall's highest balconies, made a pearly rescuing Angel. The Festival Chorus approached their music masterfully.

Tenor James Taylor, as Jephtha, was the vocal and dramatic wonder. Taylor's is a brilliant, ringing tenor, guided by a powerful technique that switches from sword-edge bright to prayer-soft in a single phrase. Physically imposing, with boyish good looks, he's also an arresting actor; just watching his changing features as he reacted to the other singers was fascinating by itself. His tortured aria "Deeper, and deeper still," in which Jephtha mourns his daughter's willingness to be sacrificed for the peace of the nation, but resolves to obey his vow, had the heft not so much of the greatest of Handel's operatic arias as the penetrating psychological analysis of music of a future age - skipping Mozart and Beethoven and leading directly to Verdi and Wagner.

Laurels go to Maestro Helmuth Rilling not just for his stately yet sensitive direction of the Festival Orchestra, but for programming a work that left me feeling as if I had truly looked into the human heart of Handel, and loved him all the better for it.