Texas Classical Review

Choreographer George Balanchine said that basing ballets on music intended for the concert hall, such as Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings and Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, had a side benefit: If viewers didn’t care for the dancing, they could enjoy the concert.

The same could apply to director Robert Wilson’s staging of Handel’s Messiah, which Houston Grand Opera has brought to the Wortham Theater Center. Someone who doesn’t get the message of the surreal, enigmatic visuals that are Wilson’s specialty—such as the man in a spacesuit who appears during the “Hallelujah” Chorus—can focus on the vital and eloquent performance led by conductor Patrick Summers.

There’s a further element of musical interest: Wilson’s staging employs the rarely heard adaptation of Messiah by Mozart. 

Mozart’s contribution consists mainly of fleshing out the orchestration and rejiggering a few arias. He brings in additional winds to add subtle dashes of contrapuntal interplay and sonic fullness all along, but occasionally a more dramatic gesture jumps out: Amid the sinuous lines of “The People Who Walked in Darkness,” the winds interject little undulations of their own, adding harmonic twists akin to those that are so telling in Mozart’s own music.

In the arias, Mozart’s most obvious change is to transfer the exuberant “Rejoice greatly” from the soprano soloist to the tenor. During Part 3, evidently to build momentum toward the climactic choruses, Mozart shortens “The trumpet shall sound” and drops “If God be for us,” using the text for a recitative. (HGO diverges from Mozart by dropping his German translation in favor of Handel’s English original.)

On Sunday afternoon, each of the soloists brought Handel their individual strengths. 

Tenor Ben Bliss handled his increased workload with particular aplomb. His “Comfort ye” reached out generously to the listener, and “Ev’ry valley” was ringing and exuberant. “Thou shall break them” strode along with a swaggering impact.

And in “Rejoice greatly,” Bliss brought Handel’s acrobatics much the same agility as first-class sopranos do—with a dash of tonal heft to boot. What’s more, he did all that as Wilson’s staging, which casts the tenor as something of a jokester, called on him to do a little happy dance through the entire number. Bliss wasn’t fazed.

When HGO premiered Joel Thompson’s holiday opera A Snowy Day in 2021, bass Nicholas Newton—playing a child’s father—contributed a few moments of full-throatedness that lent the chamber work a bit of grand-opera thrill. Evoking the likes of Judgment Day in Messiah, Newton was more commanding still. In “The people that walked in darkness,” his deep, weighty tones conjured the ominous aura, but Newton also sang with a fluency and precision that made Handel’s wandering vocal lines all the more telling. His voice surged and boomed in “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” And in “The trumpet shall sound,” Newton still sounded so vigorous and vibrant that it seemed a pity that Mozart had cut so much.

Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen brought Messiah much the same poise, smoothness and warmth that he brought in Handel’s Julius Caesar in 2017 and Saul in 2019. The final portion of “He was despised” was especially compelling with Cohen’s voice diminished to a hush in the unaccompanied words “He was despised … rejected,” and he sustained that mood until the close. 

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Cohen joined Bliss in bringing breeziness and jubilation to “O death, where is thy sting?”—and joined him in a return of the happy dance from “Rejoice Greatly,” too. Maybe the pair were dancing on death’s grave.

Even though Mozart had robbed the soprano soloist of “Rejoice greatly” and “If God be for us,” there was still enough for Ying Fang’s grace and shimmering tone to supply a key part of Messiah’s meaning. In “He shall feed his flock,” “How beautiful are the feet” and “I know that my redeemer liveth,” Fang filled Handel’s music with sweetness, grace and lilt that went straight to the arias’ essential message of consolation and hope. 

The HGO Chorus did yeoman service, compared to a concert chorus: It not only sang Handel’s music with gusto and grandeur, but memorized it and delivered it while taking part in the stage action. 

In a couple of the most florid numbers, the group’s singing was so clipped and over-articulated in the effort to be precise that it sounded labored. But the chorus’ sonic range—from hushed to resounding—enabled it to revel in Handel’s musical theatrics.

Summers, in his last production as HGO’s artistic and music director, led all that with a sure hand. He also guided the HGO Orchestra in playing with nimbleness, bite or sweetness as the music demanded. And he presumably helped the soloists shape their copious embellishments to the vocal lines, which enhanced the arias’ expressiveness and impact.

The late Wilson’s staging, created with co-director Nicola Panzer, put special theatrical demands on the singers—not only the happy dance, but the likes of stylized stances and hand gestures that help create his non-realistic atmosphere.

HGO’s cast entered into it all with conviction, as they did the enigmatic stage business. During “He shall feed his flock,” for instance, Fang poured water between a carafe and a glass. A suggestion of refreshment, perhaps? 

The staging also wove in a dancer, Alexis Fousekis, who took on many guises. During “For unto us a child is born,” the choir was offstage, and the staging called on Fousekis to surge back and forth along one diagonal of the stage, brandishing in his right hand what might have been a hand grenade. Now and then, his mouth gaped open in a silent scream. He may have embodied the earthly violence awaiting redemption.

Wilson’s mixture included many other mysterious elements, from tree trunks that floated in the air to a man’s suit with no man in it, and from the astronaut who appeared during the “Hallelujah” Chorus to a yellow-fringed creature that menaced a girl during “For he is like a refiner’s fire.” 

Wilson famously declined to explain what such things mean. For the rest of us, if they stick in our memory, maybe that in itself is an impact.

Messiah runs through May 3. houstongrandopera.org