In Mears’ bleak Royal Opera Semele, Pretty Yende stands out

If you think you know Handel’s Semele and its show-stopping aria “Myself I shall adore”, Oliver Mears has other ideas. Far from showing us an explosion of self-indulgent vanity, Mears zeroes in on the cruelty of Juno’s deceit, setting up her husband’s lover to be burnt to a crisp: we feel sympathy for Semele’s vanity, not contempt. And who knew that Pretty Yende sings Handel as if she has been doing so since the cradle? She ran through Handelian semiquavers as if this was the most natural thing in the world, her accents judged with immaculate taste and a voice that sweetened out as it hit the highest fastest notes that might normally go brittle. Mears’ interpretation of the role is an ingénue servant trapped in the hatreds of the rich and powerful and Yende acts it to perfection, injecting Semele’s mood changes into both voice and body language, creating a completely sympathetic character.

Semele may be packed with glamorous melodies, but Mears’ vision of the piece is daringly bleak. It ends well for no-one: Semele dead, her ex-fiancé Athamas and sister Ino trapped in a loveless marriage, Jupiter and Juno doomed to repeat the cycle of infidelity, jealousy and revenge. The only consolation is that the human chorus can drown its sorrows in the product of her womb, the wine god Bacchus.

Yende may have leapt in one bound to the top of the tree of Handelian singing, but the rest of the cast was not far behind both in vocal chops and in acting. In the opera’s other big showstopper, Jupiter’s “Where’er you walk”, Ben Bliss transported us to a place of utter beauty in the most gorgeous of tenors. In Juno’s accompagnato “Awake, Saturnia, from Thy Lethargy”, when Alice Coote decreed “let her fall, rolling down the depths of night”, never has a female voice plumbed the cavernous depths so viciously, and her ensuing rage aria was explosive. As Athamas, Carlo Vistoli was something of a nebbish in Act 1, but when we got to his forced marriage in Act 3, he delivered a bravura piece of melisma singing suffused with sarcasm, spitting the words “Since you so kind do prove” into the faces of Jupiter and Juno, who had destroyed his real beloved.

Brindley Sherratt was similarly anonymous as Cadmus in Act 1, but when he took the role of the Somnus in Act 2, his portrayal of the sleep god as a lecherous dirty old man was vocally rich, completely solid and perfectly consonant with the story. Niamh O’Sullivan was an attractive Ino and even a minor part like Juno’s sidekick Iris came through with style, Marianna Hovanisyan painting a terrifying picture of the dragons guarding Jupiter’s palace in “With adamant the gates are barr’d”. Last but not least, the Royal Opera Chorus were fine ambassadors for Handel and his use of them in classical Greek-Chorus style to provide human comment on divine events.

The evening did have its disappointments, most notably the setting, which is downbeat to the point where it is horribly lacking in visual appeal. Designer Annemarie Woods sets the Olympians’ palace as the kind of conference hotel that I’ve spend a lot of my life trying to avoid: blocky, anonymous and dingily lit. The regal Cadmus is demoted to a bell captain in a cheap suit; the greatest pleasures that Jupiter can summon up for Semele’s delectation seem to be the three Cs of cigarettes, champagne and chocolates. While I’m sure that Mears and Woods are trying to make a point about how ultimately empty is the hedonism provided by such gods, it makes for 90 minutes of fairly dismal viewing in Acts 1 and 2. These also dragged because, despite conductor Christian Curnyn’s best efforts, the Royal Opera Orchestra are not a period band and there was a certain weightiness to the sound which wasn’t masked by the brilliance of the singing.

But all this is forgotten from when the curtain goes up on Act 3 and the drama immediately ratchets up. The setting of Somnus’ lair is gloriously decrepit; the cruel deception of Semele by Jupiter and Juno in turn is vividly portrayed, as is Semele’s own attempts to raise her self-confidence to become something she is not, with the attendant downfall. The bitterness of Mears’ version of the ending may be far from Handel’s intentions, but it is so intelligently staged and acted as to make this opera engaging and thought-provoking, far beyond its music’s undoubted beauties. 

****1