Oratorio originated in the 16th century but is popularly associated in this country with Handel, who was composing two hundred years later.
A musical setting of a biblical narrative, it was to be sung rather than staged as drama.
Because Handel was also an opera composer, many of his oratorios are operas-in-waiting, none more so than Jephtha, the tale of the Israelite leader who vows to sacrifice the first person he sees on return from battle if God will grant him victory.
The ill-fated person is his daughter, Iphis, and in director Katie Mitchell’s skilful enactment of the work for WNO her innocence and vulnerability occupy centre stage.
The production, first seen in 2003, is set in an embattled country updated to the 1940s but doesn’t attempt to symbolise the angel, who appears at the end, with wings, to intercede on Iphis’s behalf.
Mitchell’s imaginative ploy is to have Jephtha make his vow in the intimate and annunciating presence of the angel - then with wing buds barely-disguised - who stays on in the crowd to watch events unfold.
Oratorio dramatised means that stage activity has to be invented, with often no option in such formalised works but to have everyone motionless or fussing distractedly.
It doesn’t lessen Mitchell’s achievement, sustained this time by keenly-felt performances from Robert Murray (Jephtha), Fflur Wyn (Iphis), Diana Montague (Storge) Robin Blaze (Hamor), Alan Ewing (Zebul) and Claire Ormshaw (Angel).
The humanity of the work is fugitive, and in Mitchell's conception it is coloured by distaff resentment and the exigencies of war and politics. As Iphis gets herself to a nunnery, Jephtha and company get on with the calculatedly impersonal) and probably thankless task of running a ravaged and embattled state.
The chorus sings as a galvanised entity and conductor Paul Goodwin, a noted Handelian, gets the WNO orchestra to play in the spirit of the Baroque.
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