KEY POINTS:
Saturday night's Samson must go down as one of Auckland Choral's finest achievements with much credit due to Peter Watts, a musical director who knows the value of enterprise and challenge in programming.
There is enough drama in Handel's score to fuel a handful of operas and Watts, by deft pruning, honed its narrative and ensured an almost theatrical impact.
I was not so hopeful when Pipers Sinfonia's well-measured Overture seemed unnecessarily burdened with persistently clumsy horn playing; but Watts' unfailingly spruce tempi and considered phrasing saved the moment.
David Hamilton's Samson set the scene with a short, telling recitative. This tenor seems to redefine expressivity; he can turn and bend a phrase with the sensitivity of a blues singer, a talent of considerable use in recitative singing. He made Samson a man of flesh and blood.
If Hamilton was inevitably centre-stage, in exemplary voice for the arias Total eclipse and Thus when the sun, he was also dramatically charged in his dealings with other characters such as the confrontation with Roger Wilson's bullying Harapha in Go baffled coward.
Countertenor Robert Cross, as Samson's friend Micah, was elegant of voice and beautifully pointed in his phrasing, all the time effortlessly projecting and enunciating. So fine was he, in fact, that I would have welcomed some of his omitted arias such as O Mirror of our Fickle State.
If Roger Wilson was a magnificently belligerent Harapha, striding his way through arias like Presuming Slave, then David Griffiths, as Samson's father Manoah, was more tender of mien, gauging sincerity and line with equal sensitivity in How willing my paternal love.
Nicola Edgecombe is a soprano with the clarity and poise of an Emma Kirkby. She was not only Delilah, but took on all the women's solos, including a fearless account of Let the bright seraphim, with Philip Lloyd's noble trumpet. Particularly exquisite was My faith and truth, with echoing women's voices, much of it unaccompanied.
Handel is a master of choral writing, and all the singers enjoyed the fugal scurries along with the resonant oases when the composer settles down to broader chordal matters. In a word, bravo!
