Soprano Bayrakdarian does vivid justice to classical Cleopatra in all her glory

March 15, 2008

by JOSHUA KOSMAN, Chronicle Music Critic

She was some kind of woman, that Cleopatra - bold, emotionally volatile and ultimately tragic (the asp thing). As embodied by the dynamic Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian on Thursday night, she ruled the stage of the Herbst Theatre as decisively as she once ruled ancient Egypt.

Bayrakdarian was the star of an imaginative program by Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra that featured excerpts from four 18th century operas based on this most irresistible of monarchs. One, Handel's "Giulio Cesare," was familiar; the three others, depending on your conversance with the Baroque stage, probably weren't.

Yet all four pieces proved resourceful and fiercely dramatic, and they were a testament to the undying hold that Cleopatra continues to exert over the modern imagination. The combination of sexual allure and political power never ceases to fascinate.

Bayrakdarian - last heard with Philharmonia two years ago in Jake Heggie's "To Hell and Back" - seemed to grasp that connection perfectly. Changing outfits almost as often as she changed musical keys, she presented a multifaceted portrait marked by splendid vocalism and vivid emotional fervor.

The Handel selection, "Piangerò la sorte mia," encapsulated Cleopatra's entire personality within a single aria - lyrical and mournful in the main outer sections, ferociously vindictive in the contrasting center. And Bayrakdarian delivered both strains with a dark, sumptuous vocal quality and peerless attention to the words.

The rest of the Cleopatra music, though, was every bit as compelling. An aria from Carl Heinrich Graun's "Cleopatra e Cesare" (1742) found the heroine at her most emotionally unhinged, racing though volleys of coloratura in illustration of the libretto's traditional invocation of a tempest-tossed sea.

Bayrakdarian owes a little to the Cecilia Bartoli school of coloratura singing - the passagework was precise but laborious, and attended by a series of odd grimaces. Still, there was no denying the athletic power of her delivery, and no way to resist the harmonic quirks of Graun's unusual overture.

From Johann Adolf Hasse's 1725 opera "Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra" came another rapid showpiece, this one a howl of defiance in the face of death. Here Bayrakdarian's singing grew nimbler and more expressive, tracing Hasse's melodies amid a welter of ominous rising chromatic lines from the orchestra.

Yet the evening's most arresting passage came at the end, with the death scene from Johann Mattheson's 1704 opera "Cleopatra" (the only work by all these German composers that was actually in German).

After a last-minute insertion of Cleopatra's lullaby to Marc Antony, Bayrakdarian made her way with extraordinary eloquence through "Mein Leben ist hin" ("My life is gone"), the shapely aria that begins the opera's final scene. Then came the progressively darker writing of "Wer in seinem Busen nährt Basilisk" ("Whoever embraces the basilisk"), as graphic a depiction as one would want of the act of clutching a poisonous serpent to your own breast.

Finally, in a remarkable musical coup de theatre, death comes just as it does in the real world - suddenly, instantaneously and leaving all dissonances unresolved. Bayrakdarian's hushed majesty in this scene was breathtaking.

To round out the program, McGegan led the orchestra through a pair of genial instrumental works. Janet See was the soloist in Johann Joachim Quantz's Flute Concerto No. 161 in G, producing a gorgeously warm sound from her wooden instrument but lagging consistently behind the beat. Johann David Heinichen's Concerto in F showed the entire orchestra to good advantage.