A Baroque Opera for the 21st Century

The spirit of punk runs through R.B. Schlather’s 'Rodelinda' by Handel at Hudson Hall

Oct 27, 2023

The Cast of Rodelinda: Top L-R/ Keely Futterer, Sun-Ly Pierce, Karim Sulayman Bottom L-R/ Teresa Buchholz, Douglas Williams, Brennan Hall (courtesy Hudson Hall)

(HUDSON, N.Y., October 26, 2023) – You don’t ordinarily think of George Frideric Handel as a composer of rock opera. And you don’t think of early music group Ruckus as a rock band, period (although in a telling choice, they do describe themselves as a “band” and not a “group”). Handel composed Baroque music in the early 18^th century, and Ruckus’s instrumentation includes harpsichord, oboe, theorbo, and bassoon (among typical stringed instruments).

But the creative team that put together a complete staging of Handel’s opera Rodelinda – particularly R.B. Schlather, credited with “production” but, one assumes, assuming the role of creative and conceptual director and producer – at Hudson Hall (running through Sunday, October 29), clearly has rock ‘n’ roll running through their veins. Not that this Rodelinda was some kind of reinvention or perversion of Handel’s original work – it stuck pretty close to what Handel envisioned. But what Schlather, the magnificent singer/actors, Ruckus, and the rest of the creative team did was invest their Rodelinda with a kind of punk aesthetic and dynamic that made the nearly three-hour performance feel urgent, contemporary, and incredibly fun – three adjectives one might not expect to be applied to any work by Handel or produced in the Baroque era.

From the stark, minimalist stage design, featuring angled walls that lent a foreboding touch to the proceedings, to the precise lighting, sometimes emanating from outside a window and a door in the walls, to the relentless dynamism of Ruckus’s version of Handel’s score, to the monochromatic color palette of the entire design – contrasting brilliantly with the occasional appearance of scarlet-red blood – this Rodelinda was a finely etched, detailed production of what, as is so often the case in opera, ultimately was a tragicomedy. A throne is being fought over in the wake of the supposed death of a king; pretenders to the throne plot via deceit, using each other, men and women alike, as so many chess pieces in their strategizing ways to occupy that throne. Everyone is scheming and betraying each other; as one put it, “I will use your head as a stepping-stone to the throne.” The level of real and threatened violence was on a par with something by Tarantino, and even as lightly satirical as this rendition of Rodelinda was at times, that violence was horrific.

The singer-actors were superb throughout, and I call them “singer-actors” because from top to bottom these vocalists invested as much care and forethought to their presentation as they did to their vocal feats. Everyone leaves this Rodelinda with their own favorite performers; mine was mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, who boasted a rich, colorful voice and a seemingly effortless delivery, even when singing slumped in a chair. Tenor Karim Sulayman was duly versatile and delivered the funniest line of the night: “I’m burning with conflicting emotions.” The entire opera was burning with conflicting emotions, so that line lands as self-conscious irony.

And Ruckus’s playing also treads a fine line between seriousness and irony. At a few moments, the band’s playing lent the total affair a cartoon-like feeling, in the best possible way, because the plots of these sorts of simple early operas come across today as almost cartoon-like. Ruckus was brilliant in its use of contrasting tones and textures, and a few times their percussive approach threatened to take off and sail into swing territory, or even funk.

Opera, especially Baroque opera, can be an acquired taste. But one needn’t acquire that taste to enjoy this Rodelinda for what it is: a respectfully playful staging of a musical work that transcends taste and time. In the end, this is foremost a tribute to the visionary direction of R.B. Schlather, whom we are told is planning an annual series of updated productions of Handel’s operas at Hudson Hall.

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