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Paul McCreesh: an appreciation

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"What the English like”, said Handel to Gluck, “is something they can really beat their feet to.”

Well, we haven’t changed much in 300 years, and there were plenty of toes a-tapping during the three hours of Handel’s great oratorio Saul, in an outstanding performance by the Gabrieli Consort and Players directed by Paul McCreesh.  But it’s when the toes stop tapping that the action really begins.

This is Handel at the pinnacle of his career as an opera composer, turning to one of the greatest biblical stories ever told to break the bonds of contemporary convention.  Rhythm and harmony twists and turns, touching nerve and heart where least expected.  A Hallelujah chorus bursts in upon us after barely ten minutes; there’s a little organ concerto half way through; and a star-spangled carillon which drove Saul — and Handel’s librettist, by all accounts — well-nigh mad.   And just as Handel never misses a trick of dramatic timing, so McCreesh and his musicians gave a performance of virtuoso pacing and revelatory detail, without a single weak link, down to the last solo Amalekite from the chorus.   The great “Envy” chorus — in which the Israelites gasp in horror at the green-eyed monster which brings about Saul’s downfall — was a masterly realisation of Handel’s dark swathes of vocal and harmonic movement.

Once Saul and Jonathan have been killed in battle, the rest is a silence, which resonates in Handel’s long wake of airs and choruses of grief.   And here, too — from the famous Dead March, with its austere period-instrument trombones, its pearly flutes and its coppery timpani, to David’s Air with Chorus — McCreesh had the full weight and measure of Handel’s extended Elegy.   And then the soloists.   Saul is a masterwork of psychological characterisation; and Neal Davies searched his soul, from a vocal virtuosity of raging, to the hush of fear within his bass as he seeks and sees the abyss in his encounter with the ghost of Samuel.   But, in our golden age of the counter-tenor, his role is invariably eclipsed by that of David.   And it was testimony to the power of this performance that Andreas Scholl did not sing everyone off the stage.   Yet his was. of course, a David for all to die for.   Scholl’s voice can achieve anything he demands of it.   And his imaginative demands are the highest: be it in David’s anger and grief, or in his lament for Jonathan, aching within the voice’s low register.

Mark Padmore was an eloquent Jonathan; Susan Gritton a Merab of movingly fickle flesh and blood; and Nancy Argenta, standing in for an indisposed Deborah York, feisty and disarming as Michal.