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Basking in Justin Bieber's Never Say Never

Music Features

In extremis

ARIODANTE: Paula Murrihy has come a long way, and she can go still farther.

The title role was composed for the famous castrato Carestini (though now it’s almost invariably sung by a mezzo-soprano — the great recorded performances are by Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, to whose memory Emmanuel’s Handel Ariosto Opera Festival is dedicated), and Handel wrote for him one of his very greatest arias: “Scherza infida” (“Play, faithless woman, in the bosom of your lover while I, betrayed, now go, on account of you, into the arms of death”). In the middle section, Ariodante threatens to have his naked and mournful ghost destroy the new romance. Then he repeats the first section, even more hopelessly. The orchestra plays a slow gallop (the knight sallying forth into the arms of death?) while a quiet bassoon wails his heart’s lament. Ariodante gets so choked up, he can’t even speak a complete sentence — merely uttering, repeatedly, the words “infida” (faithless) and “morte” (death).

The aria is Handel’s “To be or not to be.” The hero, in extremis, is faced with a betrayal of such vastness — a shattering of ideals, of his world order — that there’s no alternative for him but death. He is pulled between his fierce anger and his overwhelming sorrow. Suicide is not an idle threat — it’s a profound, awe-inducing mystery.

Emmanuel’s Ariodante last Saturday night was the young Irish-born mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy, who has sung quite a bit in Boston and who was a witty and mischievous Second Lady in the Santa Fe Opera’s Zauberflöte last summer. This year she is one of Emmanuel’s three Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Fellows, and this was her first Handel opera. Her voice has more the focused glow of a soprano than the usually thicker mezzo texture, and she has a soprano’s coloratura flexibility. She was outstanding in her first-act aria and duet with Ginevra (the excellent high soprano Sarah Pelletier) and in both “Cieca notte” (“Blind night”), the aria that begins the third act, and its joyous and spectacular counterpart that brings down the house near the end, “Doppo notte” (“After night”), in which Ariodante sings — across an entire two-octave range (from A to shining A) — of the new sunshine that has replaced the storm that almost capsized his boat.