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Handel – Theodora / Christie, Upshaw, Daniels, Glyndebourne Festival Opera [VHS] Specifications

After an overture played on baroque period instruments, this opera about the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire opens with a televised press conference by the business-suited Roman governor of Antioch. This paradox epitomizes a bold and spectacularly successful interpretation that merges modern visuals with 18th-century music performed in period style.

The music (glorious, vintage Handel) is entrusted to William Christie, one of the most respected living conductors of early music. His phenomenal cast is musically and theatrically right on target. The staging, by Peter Sellars, has Roman legionaries garbed as a SWAT team with automatic weapons. The Roman governor is a totally political animal with a drinking problem. Dawn Upshaw and the amazing David Daniels, Christian victims, are executed not in a pit of lions but strapped to tables for lethal injections.

This treatment not only gives dramatic impact to music that began life as an oratorio; it universalizes the subject into an indictment of any government that persecutes minorities. –Joe McLellan

Handel – Theodora / Christie, Upshaw, Daniels, Glyndebourne Festival Opera [VHS] Overviews

For his 1996 Glyndebourne staging, radical American director Peter Sellars takes Handel’s penultimate English oratorio – a tale of self-sacrificial love between a Christian virgin and a Roman imperial bodyguard (sung by David Daniels)in fourth-century, enemy occupied Antioch – and, by resetting it in modern-day America, transforms it into a timeless parable of spirtual resistance to tyranny and persecution. Cast:

Dawn Upshaw: Theodora
David Daniels: Dudymus
Frode Olsen: Valens
Richard Croft: Septimius
Lorraine Hunt: Irene

[if There are several excellent performances of Handel operas on DVD - the Copenhagen Giulio Cesare and Partenope, the Glynebourne Giulio Cesare, the Christie performance of Rodelina, the Alcina with Catherine Nagelstad - but this, a performance of Handel's next to last oratorio, is the greatest. It is one of the great works on DVD - to cut to the chase, buy it, buy it, buy it.
Musically, it is superb;no performance, neither singers, nor chorus, nor conductor, nor orthestra is less than excellent. Two of the performances are better than that-- Dawn Upshaw in the title role, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Irene. Both sing gloriously; both act the drama wonderfully. I could be happy just watching their faces, so full of character and meaning and beauty are they.
Let me rant a bit about Lieberson, she deserves it. Her performance embodies a moral beauty, a virtue, I have otherwise seen only in Dame Janet Baker's performance of Orfeo; it is one of the great performances of anything: she has great lyric line, sings beautifully, acts beautiful, and in her ecstatic moments has a face I would like to gaze on while dying.
Much credit, of course, must be given the director, Peter Sellars. His staging, while a bit fussy in the first Roman scene, is acutely sensitive to each moment of the drama, and often achieves great intensity and/or beauty. In particular, his staging of the Christian scenes marvelously dramatizes the movement of the holy spirit through human beings striving to fulfill their understanding of the will of God.
A brief word about Handel's music here. This was his favorite among his oratorios. It is a work of surpassing lyricism, great tunes, and thrilling drama - musically, it is at LEAST as good as The Messiah.]

Customer Review

There are several excellent performances of Handel operas on DVD – the Copenhagen Giulio Cesare and Partenope, the Glynebourne Giulio Cesare, the Christie performance of Rodelina, the Alcina with Catherine Nagelstad – but this, a performance of Handel’s next to last oratorio, is the greatest. It is one of the great works on DVD – to cut to the chase, buy it, buy it, buy it.
Musically, it is superb;no performance, neither singers, nor chorus, nor conductor, nor orthestra is less than excellent. Two of the performances are better than that– Dawn Upshaw in the title role, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Irene. Both sing gloriously; both act the drama wonderfully. I could be happy just watching their faces, so full of character and meaning and beauty are they.
Let me rant a bit about Lieberson, she deserves it. Her performance embodies a moral beauty, a virtue, I have otherwise seen only in Dame Janet Baker’s performance of Orfeo; it is one of the great performances of anything: she has great lyric line, sings beautifully, acts beautiful, and in her ecstatic moments has a face I would like to gaze on while dying.
Much credit, of course, must be given the director, Peter Sellars. His staging, while a bit fussy in the first Roman scene, is acutely sensitive to each moment of the drama, and often achieves great intensity and/or beauty. In particular, his staging of the Christian scenes marvelously dramatizes the movement of the holy spirit through human beings striving to fulfill their understanding of the will of God.
A brief word about Handel’s music here. This was his favorite among his oratorios. It is a work of surpassing lyricism, great tunes, and thrilling drama – musically, it is at LEAST as good as The Messiah.

Theodora: A powerful opera with interesting plot – Omar Alvarez Pereira – Leon, Nicaragua
The opera Theodora (1750) by Georg Friedrich Händel has the most sad end that I have seen in a haendelian opera. The story of a holy love between two persons isn`t so common in the operas. In this case, it deals with the soldier Dydimus and Theodora, the young woman that represents all the power that the faith in God can yield in a person. Dawn Upshaw as Theodora sounds wonderful. For me she represents the best role made by a woman that I have seen in a opera composed by Händel; her aria «Fond, flatt`ring world, adieu» (first act) is very moving. The countertenor David Daniels as Dydimus makes an outstanding role; his aria «The rapture`d soul defies the sword» in the first act is powerful; he squints a little and this deed yields a special effect to hear him; besides his duet with Upshaw «Streams of pleasure ever flowing» (third act) is superb: the best duet I have heard in a haendelian opera. Frode Olsen as Valens makes the best role in this opera: his character`s wickedness is almost natural; his aria «Racks, gibbets, sword and fire» (first act) is powerful. Richard Croft as Septimius is excellent; his aria «Descend, Kind pity, Heavenly Guest» (first act) is beauty and you feel almost in the heaven. Lorraine Hunt as Irene is superb, too. The final chorus «O love divine, thou source of fame» almost made me weep: a sad, but beauty final. This performance conducted by William Christie is superb. One of the best operas that I have. I recommend this DVD set.

Misfortune of virtue again. – Anna Shlimovich – Boston, MA United States
This is again a bizarre mixture of dubious staging and excellent singing. Obviously, my review will fall in a anti-Sellars rebels camp.

Indisputably, with such a cast, the singing is superb. My perennial favorite is Lorraine Hunt, and her “As with rosy steps the morn” to me is the pinnacle of this performance. She has the same aria on a CD with Harry Bicket conducting; it is superb. Dawn Upshaw is at her nadir, and David Daniels is phenomenal, too.

But the staging, the production – why did they place this particular piece in modernity? It is not justified neither aesthetically nor historically. If the goal was to portray the sanctity of the Saint, then Ancient Rome gives much more opportunity to depict cruelty and brutality, with the benefit of being historically correct. They could stage it at Coliseum, with poor Theodora in a cage under the arena, tied up as a wild beast, ready to be presented to the jeering unsympathetic crowd, desiring only “bread and circuses”. But apparently, Sellars’ imagination stalls and stops with a well-lubricated routine that sells, while a visit to the nearby church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, with its frescoes depicting in the most ghastly detail innumerable sufferings of martyrs would ignite any imagination. However, I doubt that Sellars took much research into the subject, and why bother? Art always resorts to the average artistic IQ of the contemporaneous epoch.

Moreover, setting the plot in modern USA is wrong even ideologically. How can it be explained that someone is condemned for her religious beliefs in this country in modernity? Oh, it is so very bad and wrong; and looked like common nonsense.

There are some unpleasant incongruities in this production, as deliberate stripping of the timid Dawn Upshaw, while her physique is not that attractive; one can compare seductive scenes in Alcina DVD with Catherine Naglestad to get an idea of how such scenes can be successful; here they look rather pathetic and aesthetically awkward.

It was stunning for me to see the disturbing similarity between this production and the recent Admeto from Halle, Handel’s Festival, with this ubiquitous medical theme being thoroughly exploited there as well; of course, Sellars takes credit for inventing this modern monstrosity, but it is sad that its influence seems to be so pervasive, perhaps due to sordid quasi-innovation of such representation; however, it is, as always, without any respect for the work and how the composer has envisioned it – certainly not like a piece of Puppet Theater with sugary cheap tear-jerking overtones, appealing to the modern audiences by scaling down the high-spirited idea.

Regardless of any production, music-wise, it was to me one of the more tedious pieces of the Maestro di Halle; his operas of adventure, as Rinaldo, Orlando, and 30+ others are so much more entertaining, including musically; of course I realize that this is an oratorio, but then Messiah is so much better. Perhaps Handel wanted to repeat Messiah success 9 years earlier, in 1741; but it did not work, it seems from the sheer fact of my own opinion and the statistics of the performance of both works.

Thinking of Lorrain Hunt and her expressive genius, it was somewhat harrowing to hear and see her sing “Lord, in Thee each night and day we pray”, here in 1996, only a few years before she departed untimely, despite her prayers, just as some extraordinary others, like Mozart, Pergolesi, etc; yet curiously, Handel himself was awarded in every aspect of earthy delight, it seems, and is forever residing in Westminster Abbey

Concluding, this is a classic example of a performance that is better to listen to than to watch.

GF Haendel ”Theodora” – Michael Heimann – Paris / France
HELP HELP HELP

This first shipment ”theodora” has never arrived !!!!!!!

The second shipment ”Julius Cesar” , shipped a month later, has arrived ten days ago.

Can you have a look into the shipments , pls
I want these two DVDs urgently.

Thanks

Michael

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