Handel: Theodora – Neumann

Handel knew he had written something extraordinary, and he was wrong about almost nothing else in his professional life quite so spectacularly as he was about London’s readiness to receive it. Three performances, dwindling houses, an earthquake that had already sent the nervous nobility scurrying to the countryside — the whole enterprise collapsed within a week. He never got over it. Late in life, pressed to program a benefit concert, he is supposed to have said the “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah would draw a crowd, but that the chorus from Theodora, “He saw the lovely youth,” was better music. History has mostly sided with the box office. Recordings like this one make the case for Handel’s own judgment.

The story is Christian martyrdom dressed as Racinian tragedy: a young Antiochene noblewoman refusing to sacrifice to Jove, condemned, and the Roman officer Didymus who loves her and dies alongside her rather than let her die alone. No spectacle, no divine machinery, none of the crowd-pleasing tricks Handel had used to fill Covent Garden for two decades. Just two people choosing death over compromise, and a chorus that keeps commenting on it like a conscience that will not shut up. Peter Neumann’s Kölner Kammerchor understands exactly what that chorus is for. The singing here has none of the plush, cathedral-scaled weight some German choirs bring to Handel. It is lean, quick on its feet, articulated with a crispness that lets you hear inner voices moving against each other. “He saw the lovely youth” comes off with real ache, not just churchly solemnity.

Buwalda’s Didymus is the album’s soft underbelly. Handel wrote this role — the only one in his entire oratorio output — for a castrato, and finding a countertenor who can inhabit that vanished sound world with real conviction remains one of the abiding headaches of Handel reading. Buwalda sounds tentative, sometimes barely arrived at pitch before he’s leaving it again. There’s a tightness in the tone that reads less like interpretive restraint than like genuine strain. He gets through the notes. Getting through is not always the same as singing.

Everyone else more than compensates. Knut Schoch’s Septimus has an easy, conversational tenor that never pushes. His “Descend, kind Pity, heavenly Guest” unfolds with a kind of unhurried tenderness, phrases shaped rather than merely delivered, and you believe this Roman soldier’s discomfort with the whole ugly business he’s been ordered to carry out.

Helena Rasker, though, is the reason to own this set. Her “As with rosy steps the morn” — one of Handel’s great slow-motion meditations, the kind of aria where seemingly nothing happens and everything happens — floats with a warmth and unforced legato that recalls, at its best moments, the great mezzo Handelians of the analog era. Yes, there’s more vibrato than the historically minded police would sanction. I didn’t mind. The voice breathes. It has color changing moment to moment, and in a role built almost entirely on sustained lyricism, that matters more than doctrinal purity of style.

Johanette Zomer’s Theodora carries the opera’s emotional weight without ever forcing it. Her “With darkness deep as is my woe” — sung in that extraordinary six-movement sequence near the work’s center, framed by twin sinfonias that Handel uses almost cinematically, dimming the lights before he raises them again — is sung with a purity of line that made the Stadthalle Wuppertal audience, to judge from the recorded silence, forget to breathe along with her. Liquid tone, exquisite control of dynamic shading against a hushed string accompaniment. This passage is the emotional keel of the whole oratorio, and Zomer finds its stillness without draining it of tension.

Against the reference recordings — Christie’s luminous Erato set with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s shattering, career-defining Theodora, or Paul McCreesh’s more architecturally cool account — Neumann’s Cologne forces don’t quite reach the interpretive heights of the Christie, whose Hunt Lieberson performance remains, for me, unmatched and probably unmatchable. But this recording holds its own through sheer choral vitality and two outstanding female principals. The engineering is superb: detailed without being clinical, with the hall’s natural bloom around the choir nicely caught.

A flawed Didymus keeps this from the very top rank. Everything around him argues that Handel, dying nearly blind and largely unheeded, knew his own worth better than his contemporaries did.