Handel’s Acis and Galatea at the Boston Early Music Festival, by Michael Miller
George Frideric Handel,
Acis and Galatea, 1718 Version
Jordan Hall
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, Musical Directors
Gilbert Blin, Stage Director
Anna Watkins, Costume Designer
Robert Mealy, Orchestra Leader
Kathleen Fay, Executive Producer
Abbie H. Katz, Associate Producer
Melinda Sullivan, Assistant to the Stage Director
Aaron Sheehan, Acis
Teresa Wakim, Galatea
Jason McStoots, Damon
Douglas Williams, Polyphemus
Michael Kelley, Coridon
Even before Handel's pastoral sinfonia was very far along, I found myself deeply immersed in the human activity I observed on the stage of Jordan Hall. Around the orchestra, who were dressed in unobtrusive modern black, some half dozen creatures of Queen Anne's day, or, more precisely, early Hanoverian days, busied themselves about a capacious drawing-room, until five of them came together to sing the opening chorus, "Oh the pleasure of the plains," evoking the landscape around Cannons. Actually they were looking into a pastoral landscape painting, its back to the audience. (At the end it was turned to reveal the composition.) While pictures were brought in and set on an easel for appreciation and perhaps purchase—the absence of a permanently hung gallery suggested that the house was not yet finished—two gentlemen at either end of the stage worked away at writing: one, Mr. Handel, was setting down notes, and the other—actually two, Mr. Gay and Mr. Pope—words. What was so absorbing about this was not so much the business itself, which is familiar enough even in early eighteenth century dress, but the mood.

