Similarly, any eighteenth-century opera seria has more story than can be consumed in an hour or two of singing. The point of these things was to hit as many emotional highlights as possible by each star singer, so they could show what they could do, bringing the story to life in twenty different moods. Handel’s (or Vivaldi’s or Hasse’s or Porpora’s) melody would take care of the rest: illustrating heartbreak or daredevil courage or true love or jealous rage. With a contrasting mood in the B-section and appropriate ornamentation in the repeat of the A-section.

Opera Essentia is a company designed to bring Handelian opera to the wide open spaces of New York. They perform in parks and churches and libraries in many boroughs (four so far), and the works are presented in essence, boiled down (if you will), eliminating the minor characters and the minor arias and all the recitative links between the tunes—one recit sounds much like any other, am I right? Printed programs summarize and translate the arias. Campos Gardens in Alphabet City is one popular venue (it was packed for Orlando and for Admeto), and Garvey Park in Harlem, but I’ve also traipsed after them to churches in Ridgewood and the Brooklyn and Jamaica Public Libraries. There’s no admission fee; anyone can wander by and wander in.

The company is led by countertenor Jeffrey Mandelbaum, who sang Ferdinand in the Met’s Enchanted Isle, that Handelian (and Rameauvian) pasticcio back before the pandemic. Mandelbaum loves the tunes of Handel (as who does not?), and loves to position them in the mouths of talented young singers. “And Handel wrote forty operas,” he points out, “of which only eight or nine are often revived. The melodies of the others are just as wonderful! Digging up these scores is like finding yourself in a warehouse with 200 unknown Van Goghs.”

The stories are clear enough. Watching From Hell to Antigone (as they have dubbed Handel’s Admeto) at Garvey Park last month, besides appreciating the amazing acoustics of the space that brightened up the voices and the instruments considerably, it struck me that this plot would be totally clear to anyone familiar with telenovelas. Local folks who had wandered in to hear what was up would not find themselves at sea. Wife is obliged to depart (in this case, she dies) and sings of her misery but is rescued from durance vile (in this case, death) by a sardonic hero (Hercules), sings ecstatically of returning to her true love (husband)—only to find him consoling himself in the arms of another woman. Her highly vocal, Handelian reaction is—well, you’ve seen a telenovela, haven’t you? Imagine that in tune, with ornaments, and you have the soprano (Kristin Renee Young) as Alceste.

Mandelbaum sang the henpecked Admeto, Nicole Besa, a soprano with soaring phrases and elegant trills, the conniving Antigona who gets her claws into him, Katherine Lerner Lee the jealous Trasimede, and bass Hans Tashjian, a company regular (there is always at least one bass in Handel, playing a thoughtful wizard or a rumbustious general) as the heroic Hercules who saves Alceste.

Last year, I found myself thoroughly caught up in Rosmene’s Choice, the Opera Essentia version of Handel’s Imeneo. Imeneo is one of Handel’s most exquisite small-scale scores. It is rarely staged and had not appeared in New York (I don’t think) for about forty years, so I was happy to go to the Brooklyn Public Library in Prospect Park, which—who knew?—has a marvelous auditorium downstairs. The singing was so good—especially the lady who sang Rosmene—that I went back a week or two later to hear another performance, this time to the Bedford Central Church in Brooklyn, a wonderful broad-beamed space with clear sound (wonderful for hymns, I’d bet), and a Senegalese restaurant around the corner.

“That’s part of the fun,” Mandelbaum assures me. “Bringing Handel to different venues all over the city—to places that aren’t familiar with opera—and discovering unknown acoustics when we do.”

This year, I caught From Hell to Antigone in the Campos Garden in Alphabet City (12^th Street near Avenue D) and was pleased enough with the music-making to seek out a later iteration in the amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park on 124^th Street. I’d never heard anything in the Garvey Amphitheater and was pleasantly astonished by its vibrant acoustic, the way the voices that had sounded adequate in Campos were revved up to brilliance, across the board, at Garvey. And the company has a following—Campos was packed, all seats full. Garvey, which has a very sizable sitting area (Shakespeare and jazz ensembles perform there), was even more accommodating.

From Hell to Antigone returns this month for four more performances by the same (one change) exceptional cast who sang it earlier in the year: September 14 at Jamaica Public Library, the 15^th at Campos Garden, the 21^st at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, and the 22^nd at the Bedford Central Church in Brooklyn—the sites, aside from Campos, are indoors in deference to the season.

The summing-up process Opera Essentia goes through sometimes alters the focus of Handel’s story. Imeneo became Rosmene’s Choice, highlighting its conflicted heroine, torn between the man she loves and the man who has rescued her from pirates (you’ve had that problem, right?). Admeto became From Hell to Antigone, its focus firmly on the woman who dies, is rescued (by Hercules) and finds her husband already consoling himself with another lady. (Handel had two prima donnas to satisfy in that one, and the plot was devised to give them equal numbers of arias.)

Next year, well, they haven’t quite decided; Tolomeo and Radamisto are under consideration. “We wanted to choose as different a plot as possible from the ones of the operas we’d given. Radamisto has two married couples, but the title character is pursuing his brother-in-law’s wife, who prefers the husband she’s got.” Battles are fought and tuneful sparks fly, but there’s a happy end with a justly famous duet. “We thought of Partenope, but the City Opera did that once—it was Bejun Mehta’s debut.” (And San Francisco Opera did it just the other day.) If they do Radamisto, they’ll call it The Queen’s Heart. Or something like that.

The company’s emergence from the shadows of the pandemic, and their mission of bringing opera to many boroughs and parks, has not gone unnoticed. NYSCA bestowed a grant this year (which has gone to fund eight, rather than five, performances, and higher salaries for the singers) and it is hoped that this will continue. “The application seemed to hit all my hopes for the company,” Mandelbaum tells me. “Roaming through the entire city, hoping to rope in new audiences. Do you know a likely venue in Staten Island?”

Photos: Opera Essentia