George Koelle

If I’d been clever, I would have gone to the freshly renovated Frick Collection early on Saturday 26 April and seen the extent of the renovations to the museum, re-acquainted myself with some of the masterpieces, and checked whether they’ve added “AS SEEN ON WOLF HALL, SUNDAY NIGHTS ON PBS” stickers to the Holbeins. But instead I made it just in time for the show: mezzo Lea Desandre and the Jupiter Ensemble in a program of arias and instrumental movements by George Frideric Handel, plus a Nico Muhly premiere featuring countertenor-cum-impresario Anthony Roth Costanzo.

The concert was the opening night of a spectacular festival of chamber performances inaugurating the new Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium. The Frick, the erstwhile palace of strikebreaking steel baron Henry Clay Frick, is home to the most dazzling collection of paintings in the city; the Schwarzman Auditorium is named for Donald Trumpadvisor/megadonor Stephen A. Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone investment firm, which currently manages over a trillion dollars in assets.

The little hall itself is a bit of cozy high modernism, simple lines and curves, off-whites and deep browns; no one detail of the design calling attention to itself, but each one pleasing to the eye. The shape of the hall reminded me of architectures borrowed from anatomy—if the floor plan of the Philips Pavilion was shaped like a stomach to digest the crowds at the ’58 World’s Fair, if the skylight of the Oculus filters the sun as if through slitted eyelids, then the ceiling of the Schwarzman is the concha of an ear with the stage at its focus, its irregular curves and folds filling the air with clearly and evenly projected sound.

George Koelle

But let’s talk about the actual music. If we are to imagine historically informed performance as a continuum between, broadly speaking, the ecclesiastically austere tendency at one end to shed late 19th- and early 20th-century interpretational flab (large orchestras, modern instruments, heavy vibrato, etc.) in order to reveal the bare bones of the score, and at the other end the tendency to flesh the music out with free ornamentation, realization, arrangement and improvisation, Jupiter Ensemble falls very much at the latter end of that continuum. Like a jazz combo or a rock band, they make music with a real sense of spontaneity and dance rhythms you can actually imagine dancing to. I wasn’t surprised to learn, after the show, that bandleader Thomas Dunford was an alum of sexy, dancy Continental bands like Les Arts Florissants and Le Concert Spirituel.

That’s not to say that one approach or the other is the “wrong” way to play Handel, though in the decades since he began to be known as the composer of sensual and vivacious operas rather than as the Messiah Guy, this approach has certainly become much more fashionable. There’s also this advantage to playing Handel like a rock band: he wrote some bangers, with the sweet melodies, satisfying cadences, and lucid structures of a great pop song. It fits!

Dunford led the band with exquisite, rippling arpeggiations on the lute, while keyboardist Caitlyn Koester filled out the harmonies on a dark-voiced continuo organ, and a quintet of strings played with extraordinary sensitivity and ensemble—precise tonal blend, dynamic balance, rhythm, and intonation. They thrilled both in the aria accompaniments and in palate-cleansing instrumental dances from Terpsichore Dances and Theodora.

George Koelle

But the star of the evening was Desandre, whose hyper-expressive vocalism could compare with any pop diva. In “With darkness deep” from Theodora, she hardly seemed to approach a single pitch head-on, instead shaping each tone with moaning, sighing emotion; with “Fly from the threatening vengeance fly” from the Occasional Oratorio, she launched into coloratura that made me feel like I was watching a car chase in a Hollywood action movie—one of the good ones, though, where you feel like you’re in the muscle car zooming through narrow European streets, the heroine at the wheel somehow careening with what seems like total disregard for her own safety while at the same time managing to never fall behind, spin out of control, or smash into oncoming traffic.

And her cadenzas! My heart started beating a little faster every time I heard one coming on. If I’m sticking with the “rock band” comparison (sorry, ladies, I am, and you’re just going to have to bear with me), these were the guitar solos, but—again—good guitar solos, the kind of righteous artistic showing-off that justifies the whole piece surrounding it.

Desandre’s voice was most satisfying by far near the top of the treble clef, and if I’m going to look for things to complain about, I’ll say I wish that she had one of those mezzo instruments that somehow turns into a trombone below a certain range, or that her diction, a model of refinement and clarity, felt as if it were spurring the music forward rather than decorating it. I also wanted to hear more shape to each aria and each section in the big picture, beyond the musical phrases. I wanted the throughline of a well-structured dramatic scene.

George Koelle

Take “As with rosy steps the morn advancing,” also from Theodora and also on this first half. I know that I am in terrible danger of becoming that old shut-in opera queen who constantly gripes that nobody can do it like his diva—but, no, everybody should be just a little bit more like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whose impossibly long, slow arcs of melody make you feel the imperceptibly slow and gradual illumination of the approaching dawn. At Desandre’s easygoing andante tempo, the morn’s rosy steps were just a little too brisk to evoke that same feeling.

But—she won me over in the second half. Something seemed to click into place with “Will the sun forget to streak” from Solomon, and when Dunford introduced the last two numbers on the program—“Guardian Angels” from The Triumph of Time & Truth and “No, no I’ll take no less” from Semele — as special favorites of the ensemble, I imagined I could hear her affinity with these arias in the gusto she gave her elegantly detailed performances. I wasn’t alone—she got an enthusiastic YAAAASS from another gay in the audience.

I’ve managed to get this far in the review without talking about the other composer on the program, sandwiched between Handel halves. I warned the good gays at parterre about this, and now I’m warning you, that I am very much IN THE TANK for Nico Muhly as a fan and a friend, so please take my opinions of his work with a grain of salt, but I’m especially fond of the music he’s writing in this phase of his career (his Middle Period??).

George Koelle

It has, I think, an almost Handelian generosity—this piece begins with a satisfying quasi-Baroque bass line, as satisfying, again, as a pop song—but while there’s a lot of the Early Music movement in Nico’s writing, he seems to approach it largely from the other end of that axis, of performance traditions passed down through the Church, concerned more with choirboy-clear sonorities than lush ornamentation.

His piece, We Sundry Things Invent, was commissioned for the occasion, drawing inspiration from a painting in the Collection—St. Francis in the Desert by Bellini (Giovanni Bellini, not the Norma guy), a breathtakingly severe landscape featuring the ascetic saint—for a setting of 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne’s “Consummation.” The musical materials, full of interlocking rhythmic cells in the accompaniment, borrow from the process music of the late 20th-century “minimalists” and “post-minimalists,” but here they are driven by a restless spirit, demanding a supple, sectional form.

Costanzo has of course worked with Nico before, and ascended to opera superstardom partly thanks to his interpretation of Nico’s mentor, Philip Glass, another composer of sweet melodies and satisfying cadences. And so I could have predicted that the countertenor would prove an ideal interpreter of this score, shaping every line with a sculptor’s finesse and nailing his non-vibrato notes with the uncanny, sinusoidal purity of tone only a countertenor can offer. He made real magic of the piece’s final moments—a held tone on the word “infinity”—where the voice is balanced against tone of string harmonics, just as uncannily pure.

Because I knew you’d want to know, I emailed to find out who the soloists were wearing, because I was so tickled by the ingenious androgyny of both of their outfits. They could have switched clothes and they’d both have pulled it off, or maybe they could have dissected both of their looks and reassembled them into one tux and one gown; Desandre’s bold bodice was designed to look like a men’s jacket with a more-than-floor-length skirt pouring out of a high, cummerbund-like waist. But instead of a shirt underneath it was décolleté all the way down. Costanzo wore a white Prada shirt under a sheer Commes des Garçon blouse and Thom Browne tuxedo pants. She wore Cartier jewels, he wore a string of pearls knotted like a necktie. Sitting in the front row, I did notice during the curtain calls that something seemed to have come undone at the back of Desandre’s already daring frock, which must have been unspeakably unnerving for her, but if so, she didn’t show it.

And there were curtain calls a-plenty (although, in this little hall, no curtains), which meant we got to hear a few spicy little encores. Costanzo and Desandre duetted in a radiant “Eternal source of light divine” from Handel’s “Queen Anne Ode,” followed by Desandre’s rendition of “We Are the Ocean,” a sweet and ingenuous pop tune penned by Dunford with contrabassist/composer Doug Balliett (not the bassist for Jupiter—another, wholly unrelated bassist).

I said “guitar solos” before but, I shit you not, in “We Are the Ocean,” Dunford actually introduced each member of the band with traded instrumental solos, as if they’d just been backing Chaka Khan instead of a couple of opera singers. (“And on viola…!” etc.) I don’t foresee this number burning its way up the Hot 100, but it was a charming encapsulation of the energy that had been motivating the evening. The Jupiter Ensemble doesn’t just give a recital: in finding the connections between the Baroque Canon of 300 years ago and the lively vernacular traditions of the present, they put on a show. You can hear them play Handel on an album collecting these movements (with the brighter-hued countertenor Iestyn Davies joining Desandre on vocals!), but seeing them in concert is something else: dramatically present, unpredictable, and alive.