"What would Milton think?" I found myself wondering 10 minutes into the stunning new video of Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (BelAir Classiques), taped live at Madrid's Teatro Real in July 2014 (and a few months ago had its 90 minutes of fame on PBS). It's hard to square that this is the first visual record of a piece that had its premiere a quarter-century ago, has been revived in festival settings ever since, and is the work dance historians are likely to deem Morris' greatest, or nearly so, anyway. But that's part and parcel of the package of this improbable Gesamtkunstwerk �" "total" in the sense that, against successive odds, a series of philosophical poems by the young John Milton became a one-of-a-kind ode by a mature George Frideric Handel and was transformed, around the time of the Handel tercentenary, into one of the most lyrical dances of our time.
For reasons irrelevant to this review, I've lately been knee-deep in Milton's Paradise Lost (which colleagues tried to get Handel to turn into an oratorio, a project he adroitly side-stepped). So I'm steeped in the milieu of one of those high-minded moral philosophers whose mindset seems even more remote from 2015 than Gould's Book of Fish is from Moby-Dick. As to what Milton would think of Morris' masterpiece, I'm guessing that he would have responded to accurate reports of it with another paean to his blindness, its revelry in the natural movements and beauties of the human body perhaps a bit much. Handel, on the other hand �" with allowances for the cultural whiplash of a three-century Rip Van Winkle awakening �" would, I think, have wept with pleasure.
Milton's poems portray one of those Enlightenment "disputes" between mirth (L'Allegro) and seriousness (Il Penseroso), with the mitigating sentiments of the arbitrator (Il Moderato ) added by Handel's "librettists" (including his friend Charles Jennens, who put together the "book" for Messiah). The resulting text was ready-made for Handel, who already had a comparable argument between Truth and Time under his belt, and who had long since proved himself one of music's most ingenious word-setters. Barely has the poet mentioned birds than a sublime flute obbligato representing birdsong alights from Handel's score.
Angry letters to the editor will soon enough prove how many other choreographers have set not just music but words, but still I ask, who but Morris would be inclined to set music with words to dance, and do it with the brilliance and brio of Handel? Keen observers will note that Morris is so attuned to the score that he occasionally lets good stretches of that piping flute-bird solo go un-choreographed, on a bare stage. That's tribute.
In the longish segment "Mirth admit me of thy crew," which makes up nearly half of Part I, Morris seizes the first bird reference and puts two of his dancers beak to beak, tilting their heads in that jerky-birdy way, then expands the visual metaphor until it takes in the entire company and more evocations of bird life than in the complete Audubon. If that doesn't put you into mirth's crew, well. At the segment's hot core is an episode with a male solo dancer who birds it up with every cliche of the effeminate gay you can imagine, jubilant, unapologetic, and did I mention?, heart-breakingly beautiful. It's precisely Morris' genius at taking everything right up to the cliff's edge of camp and the music hall at its booziest, without plunging into bathos or self-hatred, that makes his L'Allegro that thing art so craves yet so seldom achieves: celebration.
As mirth would have it, at almost exactly the same time, Handel's ode, which has had a happy enough life on disc and been something of a staple in the repertoire of SF's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (Morris' pit band at the premiere), has been treated to its finest outing yet on disc, from Paul McCreesh and his Gabrieli Consort and Players (Signum/Winged Lion). It's the first recording that re-creates the work's premiere in 1740. But if that sounds like yet another exercise in musty historical recreation, listen up.
As is his wont, McCreesh recorded the work only after he had performed and toured it with these musicians for more than a year, so it sounds "lived in," confident, comfortable, flexible and out to entertain in the deepest sense. One of the lagniappes is that the astounding male treble (a part usually taken by a second soprano) is sung by Laurence Trilby, caught in the weeks before his voice began to "break," at age 15. When he sings, "Mirth, admit me of thy crew," you hear not some white-voiced boy soprano, but a singer of wild imagination.
The music-making throughout is ripe and affecting, its perfection of execution in constant service to the music and text. The segues from solo voices to chorus and back are so seamless you've usually made the transition before noticing you have. The solo singing is uniformly front-rank, with celebrity vocalists Gillian Webster, Peter Harvey, and Ashley Riches regularly surpassing themselves. Yet first among these equals is tenor Jeremy Ovenden, a singer of unflagging imagination. A fair description of his voice might pass over the customary beauties of tone and the like. But he grabs you by the ears with his first appearance, in "Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee," whose rollicking coloratura (though that's not quite the word for it) and almost yodeled ho-ho-ho-ho-ho on the onomatopoetic first syllable of "holding" in "And Laughter, holding both his sides" �" which the chorus picks up as nimbly �" will make you hold yours.
These people do the "serious" music with the same penetration, and McCreesh adds fine touches such as the Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, Nos. 1 and 3, and the Organ Concerto, Op. 7, No. 1, used as transitional music, rather like scene changes that let the longer work breathe. But what you're more likely to take away is the smile smeared all over your face.