Susanna Phillips Shines as Agrippina

Boston Baroque Does Popular Handel Opera

By: David Bonetti - May 01, 2015

Soprano Susanna Phillips gave a superstar caliber performance as Agrippina, whose goal is to see her son Nerone crowned Emperor of Rome. Here, she handles the crown. (All photos by Kathy Wittman.)

Soprano Amanda Forsythe played Poppea as a tart in love with jewels and pearls. Here, she appears with the Emperor Claudio, who bass-baritone Kevin Deas portrayed as a camera-loving buffoon.

The extraordinary Australian countertenor David Hansen as Nero, here crowning himself.

Agrippina
A serio-comic opera in three-acts by George Frideric Handel
Libretto by Vincenzo Grimani
First performance: Teatro San Giovanni Gristostomo, Venice, 1709
Boston Baroque
Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory
April 24 & 25, 2015

Boston Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Martin Pearlman
Semi-staged by Mark Streshinsky
Costumes by Charles Schoonmaker
Cast: Susanna Phillips (Agrippina, wife of the emperor Claudius), Kevin Deas (Claudio, emperor of Rome), David Hansen (Nerone, Agrippina’s son), Amanda Forsythe (Poppea, a Roman “lady”), Marie Lenormand (Ottone, an army commander), Douglas Williams (Pallante, a freedman), Krista River (Narcisco, a freedman), Mark McSweeney (Lesbo, a servant)

Let me get to the point without wasting any time: In the title role of Agrippina, soprano Susanna Phillips gave a performance of superstar caliber. In perfect voice through all her vocal registers with constant beauty of tone, she was dramatic in both her singing and acting, mining the endless comic possibilities of the ruthless, scheming, amoral Roman Empress, swinging her gold lamé purse and rearranging her matching cape like a Real Housewife of the Parioli district. Her performance was so astonishing that I had to hear her sing her two extraordinary second-act arias again, so I did something I haven’t done in years – I second-acted the Saturday performance. (For those not in the know, that means that I arrived at intermission and walked in looking as if I owned the house.)

What made Phillips’s performance all the more satisfying is that she was part of a cast for the most part composed of other excellent singing actors. As her hapless fop of a son, Nerone, who would decline into homicidal degeneracy once he achieved power, Australian David Hansen, the latest star-quality countertenor to arrive on the international scene, sang with an amazing mix of an unnaturally high tessitura and virility, bringing to mind a young David Daniels, who showed that countertenors, who had been seen (and heard) as freakish, could be butch.

As Poppea, the material girl in love with jewels and pearls, who sets the lust of half the male members of cast in overdrive, Amanda Forsythe played the role to comic perfection, shooting glances, taking poses, endlessly primping, all the while producing the sweet, seamless soprano she is known for. And as the big cheese, Emperor Claudio, bass-baritone Kevin Deas played the ruler of the known world as a clown, taking selfies with the audience as he entered down an aisle to a stately march, hamming it up on stage for the paparazzi, striking poses out of a Madonna video.

Of the principals only French mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand disappointed, her voice which was “correct,” as the French would say, was too weak to do justice to the role of Ottone, the only moral character in the opera. One wonders if she could barely be heard in 1,000-seat Jordan Hall, what size hall would be ideal for her.

OK, let’s step back a bit. Handel (1685-1759) was not only amazingly prolific, writing 42 operas, most in Italian, 25 oratorios, most in

English, dozens of cantatas and sacred works and numerous instrumental pieces, he was also a prodigy. Two years ago the biennial Boston Early Music Festival presented his seldom produced first opera, “Almira,” written, mostly in German – there were some arias in Italian, which was common practice at the time - for the Hamburg opera when he was only 19 years old. It was an odd work, remarkable for one so young, but burdened by a dreadful text abandoned by the composer who was supposed to write the music but left town instead. Much of it was frankly boring, and it went on and on as some Baroque operas do, but it showed sparks of the genius for the kind of bravura vocal music Handel became famous for. He wrote a few more operas in German, which have been lost – maybe just as well - and then he high-tailed it to Italy, the center of opera production and appreciation in Europe at the time.

“Agrippina” was his third surviving opera, and his first hit. Written for Venice when he was 24 years old, it is the work of a mature artist with fully developed and individualized characters, dramatic complexity – comedy morphing seamlessly into and out of something more serious – and gorgeous melodies and arias and apt instrumental accompaniment.

It has also become popular. This is the second time I’ve heard it produced in Boston in the five years I’ve been living here. Indeed, the first opera I reviewed for Berkshire Fine Arts was the Boston Lyric Opera’s production, which was borrowed from the Glimmerglass summer opera festival and subsequently traveled to the New York City Opera (RIP). And from what I understand, Boston Baroque did the work some ten years ago as well. That makes three professional productions in 10 years – what you might expect in other cities of a “Traviata” or “Bohème,” not of an early work by a Baroque composer whose operas are only now coming back into the repertory. Boston has always had its own enthusiasms and done things its own way - with both good and bad consequences.

So, what happened? What was Handel doing during his first couple of years in Italy? Well, he landed in Rome, where a conservative Pope had banned opera performances or any appearance of women on stage. Sophisticated members of the Roman aristocracy commissioned cantatas from Handel and other composers, which they presented in private theaters in their palaces. For a couple of years, the young Handel wrote cantatas, honing his melodic and dramatic skills, so when he arrived in Venice, a hot bed of opera, he was ready to go, borrowing many of the arias in “Agrippina” from his Roman work. And the attitude of the Church in Venice was diametrically opposed to that of the Church of Rome. Indeed, “Agrippina” ‘s sophisticated, cynical libretto was written by a Cardinal, Vincenzo Grimani, whose family owned the theater where it was premiered. One wonders how much that ecclesiastic position cost.

The opera is all about corruption. It is composed of power plays, erotic shenanigans and endless scheming, and it is based on real historical characters. In his program note, Boston Baroque music director Martin Pearlman cites Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius as the source of the story of the decadent dynasty that came to its end with Nero fiddling while Rome burned. (That likely apocryphal part of the story is not in the opera, which ends with Nerone being crowned Emperor and a false sense of peace and stability being celebrated.)

What makes the opera particularly popular among Handel’s works is that we can all relate to it – are the values of our society any less amoral or venal? Is our own political life any more noble? Isn’t the stage of our public consciousness, from reality TV to contemporary politics, populated with scoundrels, fools, charlatans, amoralists and ruthless schemers that seem to have been drawn from ancient Roman history? And the rare ethical man, like Ottone, stands out as a being out of alignment with his times. In other words, has human nature changed much over the past 2,000 years?

The opera was done in the semi-staged style both Boston early music groups have mastered over the years. The small orchestra sits in the middle of the stage and the action takes place in front and to the sides of it with occasional use of the aisles. Unlike the Boston Early Music Festival, which prefers opulent period costumes, Boston Baroque embraces modern dress. Charles Schoonmaker’s costumes revealed character. In her gold and high-heels, Agrippina looked like the ambitious suburban housewife she essentially is. In her tarty attire, always in danger of falling off her, Poppea looked like, well, a tart. In his sleek suit, his shirt open to his navel, Nerone looked more like a sensualist longing to get laid than a schemer longing to get crowned. And for a bit of eye-candy, “barihunk” baritone Douglas Williams, in a small part, looked fetching in a white tanktop and boxer shorts fleeing Agrippina’s bedroom.

The unattributed sets consisted of two square platforms on either side of the stage that could rotate, revealing a different scene on each side. The backdrop of the first scene was a copy of Raphael’s “The School of Athens,” one of his great murals in the Vatican, which didn’t make much sense to me – the mural featured thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, and we were watching some of the least philosophically inclined rulers in Roman history. When turned, however, the mural changed to a grisaille version of Thomas Couture’s “The Romans of the Decadence.” So the point was made: the culture and ethics of the ancient world had declined from the heights of Periclean Athens to the degeneracy of the age of Agrippina and Nero.

Mark Streshinsky’s direction was always spot on, every detail fully thought out, and with his talented cast of singing actors, executed. Some of the action was anachronistic, like Claudio taking selfies with audience members and Nerone passing out money to the audience as he campaigns for Emperor. But they both underscore the continuity of venality between ancient Rome and today, Claudio’s action underlining the pervasiveness of celebrity culture – the portrait of the Emperor was on every coin – and Nerone’s the fact that all elections are bought, whether by the small-scale graft of simpler days or on a national level by the likes of the Koch brothers.

There were too many delicious directorial moments to enumerate, but let one suffice. In the first act, one of the two sets revolves, revealing Poppea in her boudoir admiring herself in her compact mirror. “Beautiful pearls, fragrant flowers, adorn my brow,” Forsythe sang with effortless coloratura. As her voice rose, she pulled an apparently endless strand of pearls out of a jewelry box, causing of course the audience to laugh, but the action mimed her vocal performance, creating a perfect union of sound and action. Brilliant.

And in what has become a tradition, Pearlman was drawn into the action while conducting. The first time when an angry Poppea is brandishing a knife a little too close to him for comfort and he seizes it, the second time when Agrippina pulls the crown off Nerone’s head and places it on Pearlman’s, both moments eliciting laughter.

As usual, Pearlman conducted his early instrument orchestra with verve and style

To go back where I started, most of the singing was also brilliant. As Agrippina, Susanna Phillips, who has sung here before in small roles with the Boston Lyric Opera and in a recital I regrettably missed presented by the Celebrity Series, gave a performance that will long be remembered. (I first heard her as the Countess in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” opposite the Count of Mariusz Kwiecien at the Santa Fe Opera in one of those performances in which you realize you’re hearing the opera stars of the future.)

An easy stage presence, Phillips sang a number of standout arias that showed a range of emotion. The two in the second act I had to hear again demonstrated her range. Both stressed Agrippina’s overriding drive: to see her son Nerone crowned Emperor – she carries a gold crown in her purse, which she pulled out from time to time - but in dramatically different modes.

The first, “Pensieri, voi mi tormentate,” was a dramatic change from almost everything that has come before, the sunny, light transparency of Handel’s music suddenly turned dark. Strings, harshly synchronized, almost percussive, set an ominous mood. When the voice enters, it is unearthly, rising from the depths, out of some unexplored place. Accompanied by an oboe, it makes for a remarkable duet. In it, Agrippina showed a rare moment of doubt – her thoughts torment her. She calls on Heaven to make her son Emperor. Phillips summoned her opening sounds from god knows where, and she delivered the subtlest trill I’ve ever heard on the “i” of “pensieri.” I’ve never heard such ethereal singing. It sent shivers down my spine – both nights I heard it.

The other aria, “Ogni vento” (May every wind bring him to port again), light, almost jaunty, in waltz meter, shows Agrippina fully back in her game– confident, ready to do anything necessary to make Nerone Emperor. This is an easy aria to like and Phillips put it over with brio.

Like Phillips, David Hansen was making his Boston Baroque debut. And like her, he gave us something special, not that we haven’t heard superb countertenors in Boston for years. The countertenor voice is still a little freakish for most of the audience, especially if it’s new to them - a singer who is obviously a man singing with a voice that sounds like that of a woman. Hansen, who is young, handsome, lithe and, as Nerone, horny for every woman he encounters, including his mother – they have one brief scene together that suggests a greater intimacy - made his masculinity plain. In his futile courting of Poppea, he feels himself up and strips off his shirt as she frantically tries to get it back on him. Through all the comedy, he sang with sweetness of tone, and in one case, an outburst of angry bravura coloratura that came as a shock.

As we have come to expect, Forsythe, the pillar of Boston’s early music world, gave a scintillating performance, transforming a two-dimensional character into one with some substance. In one duet with Ottone, she expresses real love for something other than baubles. It is the only love duet in the entire opera. On the other hand, Forsythe played Poppea’s materialism to the hilt. In a garden scene, in which Handel matches woodwinds with the soprano voice to suggest a duet with the birds, Forsythe sang with wonderful, apparently effortful ornamentation about her love for Ottone. As soon as it is over, she threw herself on her sofa, pretending to sleep with the exaggeration of a great film comedian.

As Claudio, Kevin Deas’s booming baritone suggested kingliness even as his behavior suggested buffoonery.

The hole at the center of the opera was, alas, Marie Lenormand’s Ottone, who was a cipher. In the BLO production 35 years ago, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, then at the start of his career, plumbed Ottone’s confusion and despair, making him the moral center of the opera. (If that’s a little confusing, let me explain. The role of Nerone was written for a castrato, a role that can be done today by mezzos or countertenors, the latter of which I prefer. Ottone, however, according to Pearlman, was originally written for a female performer, which is the way he cast it. Why the BLO cast a countertenor, I don’t know, but in this case it made a better decision.)

In smaller roles, Douglas Williams as Pallante, sang and acted brilliantly – too bad Pearlman didn’t interpolate a baritone aria for him from another opera, which was a common practice in Handel’s time. In the trouser role of Narciso mezzo Krista River, like Lenormand, sang too weakly to make much of an impression. And in the most thankless role of all, baritone Mark McSweeney, who played a servant, was fine.

The Claudius, Agrippina, Nero family was one of the most dysfunctional in Roman history – which is quite an achievement. But that’s why we know about them today. “Agrippina” isn’t the only opera based on them. Monteverdi’s “L’incorononazione di Poppea” (Poppea’s Coronation), the first great opera in the genre, was written nearly 70 years earlier than “Agrippina” but is set in the future – like Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and Rossini’s “I barbiere di Siviglia” - when Nero is on the throne and Poppea is his mistress. One of the exciting prospects of this season is that the Boston Early Music Festival is mounting all three surviving Monteverdi operas, and both Forsythe and Hansen will reprise their roles as Poppea and Nero in “Poppea.” That takes place in June – make you reservations now for what should be a once in a lifetime experience.    

“Agrippina”

A serio-comic opera in three-acts by George Frideric Handel

Libretto by Vincenzo Grimani

First performance: Teatro San Giovanni Gristostomo, Venice, 1709

Boston Baroque

Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory

April 24 & 25, 2015

Boston Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Martin Pearlman

Semi-staged by Mark Streshinsky

Costumes by Charles Schoonmaker

Cast: Susanna Phillips (Agrippina, wife of the emperor Claudius), Kevin Deas (Claudio, emperor of Rome), David Hansen (Nerone, Agrippina’s son), Amanda Forsythe (Poppea, a Roman “lady”), Marie Lenormand (Ottone, an army commander), Douglas Williams (Pallante, a freedman), Krista River (Narcisco, a freedman), Mark McSweeney (Lesbo, a servant)

Let me get to the point without wasting any time: In the title role of Agrippina, soprano Susanna Phillips gave a performance of superstar caliber. In perfect voice through all her vocal registers with constant beauty of tone, she was dramatic in both her singing and acting, mining the endless comic possibilities of the ruthless, scheming, amoral Roman Empress, swinging her gold lamé purse and rearranging her matching cape like a Real Housewife of the Parioli district. Her performance was so astonishing that I had to hear her sing her two extraordinary second-act arias again, so I did something I haven’t done in years – I second-acted the Saturday performance. (For those not in the know, that means that I arrived at intermission and walked in looking as if I owned the house.)

What made Phillips’s performance all the more satisfying is that she was part of a cast for the most part composed of other excellent singing actors. As her hapless fop of a son, Nerone, who would decline into homicidal degeneracy once he achieved power, Australian David Hansen, the latest star-quality countertenor to arrive on the international scene, sang with an amazing mix of an unnaturally high tessitura and virility, bringing to mind a young David Daniels, who showed that countertenors, who had been seen (and heard) as freakish, could be butch.

As Poppea, the material girl in love with jewels and pearls, who sets the lust of half the male members of cast in overdrive, Amanda Forsythe played the role to comic perfection, shooting glances, taking poses, endlessly primping, all the while producing the sweet, seamless soprano she is known for. And as the big cheese, Emperor Claudio, bass-baritone Kevin Deas played the ruler of the known world as a clown, taking selfies with the audience as he entered down an aisle to a stately march, hamming it up on stage for the paparazzi, striking poses out of a Madonna video.

Of the principals only French mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand disappointed, her voice which was “correct,” as the French would say, was too weak to do justice to the role of Ottone, the only moral character in the opera. One wonders if she could barely be heard in 1,000-seat Jordan Hall, what size hall would be ideal for her.

OK, let’s step back a bit. Handel (1685-1759) was not only amazingly prolific, writing 42 operas, most in Italian, 25 oratorios, most in

English, dozens of cantatas and sacred works and numerous instrumental pieces, he was also a prodigy. Two years ago the biennial Boston Early Music Festival presented his seldom produced first opera, “Almira,” written, mostly in German – there were some arias in Italian, which was common practice at the time - for the Hamburg opera when he was only 19 years old. It was an odd work, remarkable for one so young, but burdened by a dreadful text abandoned by the composer who was supposed to write the music but left town instead. Much of it was frankly boring, and it went on and on as some Baroque operas do, but it showed sparks of the genius for the kind of bravura vocal music Handel became famous for. He wrote a few more operas in German, which have been lost – maybe just as well - and then he high-tailed it to Italy, the center of opera production and appreciation in Europe at the time.

“Agrippina” was his third surviving opera, and his first hit. Written for Venice when he was 24 years old, it is the work of a mature artist with fully developed and individualized characters, dramatic complexity – comedy morphing seamlessly into and out of something more serious – and gorgeous melodies and arias and apt instrumental accompaniment.

It has also become popular. This is the second time I’ve heard it produced in Boston in the five years I’ve been living here. Indeed, the first opera I reviewed for Berkshire Fine Arts was the Boston Lyric Opera’s production, which was borrowed from the Glimmerglass summer opera festival and subsequently traveled to the New York City Opera (RIP). And from what I understand, Boston Baroque did the work some ten years ago as well. That makes three professional productions in 10 years – what you might expect in other cities of a “Traviata” or “Bohème,” not of an early work by a Baroque composer whose operas are only now coming back into the repertory. Boston has always had its own enthusiasms and done things its own way - with both good and bad consequences.

So, what happened? What was Handel doing during his first couple of years in Italy? Well, he landed in Rome, where a conservative Pope had banned opera performances or any appearance of women on stage. Sophisticated members of the Roman aristocracy commissioned cantatas from Handel and other composers, which they presented in private theaters in their palaces. For a couple of years, the young Handel wrote cantatas, honing his melodic and dramatic skills, so when he arrived in Venice, a hot bed of opera, he was ready to go, borrowing many of the arias in “Agrippina” from his Roman work. And the attitude of the Church in Venice was diametrically opposed to that of the Church of Rome. Indeed, “Agrippina” ‘s sophisticated, cynical libretto was written by a Cardinal, Vincenzo Grimani, whose family owned the theater where it was premiered. One wonders how much that ecclesiastic position cost.

The opera is all about corruption. It is composed of power plays, erotic shenanigans and endless scheming, and it is based on real historical characters. In his program note, Boston Baroque music director Martin Pearlman cites Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius as the source of the story of the decadent dynasty that came to its end with Nero fiddling while Rome burned. (That likely apocryphal part of the story is not in the opera, which ends with Nerone being crowned Emperor and a false sense of peace and stability being celebrated.)

What makes the opera particularly popular among Handel’s works is that we can all relate to it – are the values of our society any less amoral or venal? Is our own political life any more noble? Isn’t the stage of our public consciousness, from reality TV to contemporary politics, populated with scoundrels, fools, charlatans, amoralists and ruthless schemers that seem to have been drawn from ancient Roman history? And the rare ethical man, like Ottone, stands out as a being out of alignment with his times. In other words, has human nature changed much over the past 2,000 years?

The opera was done in the semi-staged style both Boston early music groups have mastered over the years. The small orchestra sits in the middle of the stage and the action takes place in front and to the sides of it with occasional use of the aisles. Unlike the Boston Early Music Festival, which prefers opulent period costumes, Boston Baroque embraces modern dress. Charles Schoonmaker’s costumes revealed character. In her gold and high-heels, Agrippina looked like the ambitious suburban housewife she essentially is. In her tarty attire, always in danger of falling off her, Poppea looked like, well, a tart. In his sleek suit, his shirt open to his navel, Nerone looked more like a sensualist longing to get laid than a schemer longing to get crowned. And for a bit of eye-candy, “barihunk” baritone Douglas Williams, in a small part, looked fetching in a white tanktop and boxer shorts fleeing Agrippina’s bedroom.

The unattributed sets consisted of two square platforms on either side of the stage that could rotate, revealing a different scene on each side. The backdrop of the first scene was a copy of Raphael’s “The School of Athens,” one of his great murals in the Vatican, which didn’t make much sense to me – the mural featured thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, and we were watching some of the least philosophically inclined rulers in Roman history. When turned, however, the mural changed to a grisaille version of Thomas Couture’s “The Romans of the Decadence.” So the point was made: the culture and ethics of the ancient world had declined from the heights of Periclean Athens to the degeneracy of the age of Agrippina and Nero.

Mark Streshinsky’s direction was always spot on, every detail fully thought out, and with his talented cast of singing actors, executed. Some of the action was anachronistic, like Claudio taking selfies with audience members and Nerone passing out money to the audience as he campaigns for Emperor. But they both underscore the continuity of venality between ancient Rome and today, Claudio’s action underlining the pervasiveness of celebrity culture – the portrait of the Emperor was on every coin – and Nerone’s the fact that all elections are bought, whether by the small-scale graft of simpler days or on a national level by the likes of the Koch brothers.

There were too many delicious directorial moments to enumerate, but let one suffice. In the first act, one of the two sets revolves, revealing Poppea in her boudoir admiring herself in her compact mirror. “Beautiful pearls, fragrant flowers, adorn my brow,” Forsythe sang with effortless coloratura. As her voice rose, she pulled an apparently endless strand of pearls out of a jewelry box, causing of course the audience to laugh, but the action mimed her vocal performance, creating a perfect union of sound and action. Brilliant.

And in what has become a tradition, Pearlman was drawn into the action while conducting. The first time when an angry Poppea is brandishing a knife a little too close to him for comfort and he seizes it, the second time when Agrippina pulls the crown off Nerone’s head and places it on Pearlman’s, both moments eliciting laughter.

And, as usual, Pearlman conducted his early instrument orchestra with verve and style

To go back where I started, most of the singing was also brilliant. As Agrippina, Susanna Phillips, who has sung here before in small roles with the Boston Lyric Opera and in a recital I regrettably missed presented by the Celebrity Series, gave a performance that will long be remembered. (I first heard her as the Countess in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” opposite the Count of Mariusz Kwiecien at the Santa Fe Opera in one of those performances in which you realize you’re hearing the opera stars of the future.)

An easy stage presence, Phillips sang a number of standout arias that showed a range of emotion. The two in the second act I had to hear again demonstrated her range. Both stressed Agrippina’s overriding drive: to see her son Nerone crowned Emperor – she carries a gold crown in her purse, which she pulled out from time to time - but in dramatically different modes.

The first, “Pensieri, voi mi tormentate,” was a dramatic change from almost everything that has come before, the sunny, light transparency of Handel’s music suddenly turned dark. Strings, harshly synchronized, almost percussive, set an ominous mood. When the voice enters, it is unearthly, rising from the depths, out of some unexplored place. Accompanied by an oboe, it makes for a remarkable duet. In it, Agrippina showed a rare moment of doubt – her thoughts torment her. She calls on Heaven to make her son Emperor. Phillips summoned her opening sounds from god knows where, and she delivered the subtlest trill I’ve ever heard on the “i” of “pensieri.” I’ve never heard such ethereal singing. It sent shivers down my spine – both nights I heard it.

The other aria, “Ogni vento” (May every wind bring him to port again), light, almost jaunty, in waltz meter, shows Agrippina fully back in her game– confident, ready to do anything necessary to make Nerone Emperor. This is an easy aria to like and Phillips put it over with brio.

Like Phillips, David Hansen was making his Boston Baroque debut. And like her, he gave us something special, not that we haven’t heard superb countertenors in Boston for years. The countertenor voice is still a little freakish for most of the audience, especially if it’s new to them - a singer who is obviously a man singing with a voice that sounds like that of a woman. Hansen, who is young, handsome, lithe and, as Nerone, horny for every woman he encounters, including his mother – they have one brief scene together that suggests a greater intimacy - made his masculinity plain. In his futile courting of Poppea, he feels himself up and strips off his shirt as she frantically tries to get it back on him. Through all the comedy, he sang with sweetness of tone, and in one case, an outburst of angry bravura coloratura that came as a shock.

As we have come to expect, Forsythe, the pillar of Boston’s early music world, gave a scintillating performance, transforming a two-dimensional character into one with some substance. In one duet with Ottone, she expresses real love for something other than baubles. It is the only love duet in the entire opera. On the other hand, Forsythe played Poppea’s materialism to the hilt. In a garden scene, in which Handel matches woodwinds with the soprano voice to suggest a duet with the birds, Forsythe sang with wonderful, apparently effortful ornamentation about her love for Ottone. As soon as it is over, she threw herself on her sofa, pretending to sleep with the exaggeration of a great film comedian.

As Claudio, Kevin Deas’s booming baritone suggested kingliness even as his behavior suggested buffoonery.

The hole at the center of the opera was, alas, Marie Lenormand’s Ottone, who was a cipher. In the BLO production 35 years ago, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, then at the start of his career, plumbed Ottone’s confusion and despair, making him the moral center of the opera. (If that’s a little confusing, let me explain. The role of Nerone was written for a castrato, a role that can be done today by mezzos or countertenors, the latter of which I prefer. Ottone, however, according to Pearlman, was originally written for a female performer, which is the way he cast it. Why the BLO cast a countertenor, I don’t know, but in this case it made a better decision.)

In smaller roles, Douglas Williams as Pallante, sang and acted brilliantly – too bad Pearlman didn’t interpolate a baritone aria for him from another opera, which was a common practice in Handel’s time. In the trouser role of Narciso mezzo Krista River, like Lenormand, sang too weakly to make much of an impression. And in the most thankless role of all, baritone Mark McSweeney, who played a servant, was fine.

The Claudius, Agrippina, Nero family was one of the most dysfunctional in Roman history – which is quite an achievement. But that’s why we know about them today. “Agrippina” isn’t the only opera based on them. Monteverdi’s “L’incorononazione di Poppea” (Poppea’s Coronation), the first great opera in the genre, was written nearly 70 years earlier than “Agrippina” but is set in the future – like Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and Rossini’s “I barbiere di Siviglia” - when Nero is on the throne and Poppea is his mistress. One of the exciting prospects of this season is that the Boston Early Music Festival is mounting all three surviving Monteverdi operas, and both Forsythe and Hansen will reprise their roles as Poppea and Nero in “Poppea.” That takes place in June – make you reservations now for what should be a once in a lifetime experience.