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Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale's new music director Peter Whelan admires Handel's 1728 masterpiece "Tolomeo," an opus filled with passion, resilience and transformation.
"‘Tolomeo' ends with something Baroque opera returns to again and again but never makes feel formulaic: the possibility of redemption, of relationships restored, of people finding their way back to each other after enormous suffering. That's not naive optimism - the opera earns it through genuine darkness and real emotional cost," says Whelan, the fourth music director in the 45-year history of the San Francisco ensemble that plays Baroque, Classical and early Romantic music on period instruments.
Dublin, Ireland-born Whelan, who also directs the Irish Baroque Orchestra, fittingly chose "Tolomeo" to open PBO's 2026-27 season, his first in the director's post. Last year, he conducted PBO's performances of Handel's "Alceste." This week he conducts a semi-staged version of "Tolomeo" on July 23 in San Francisco's Herbst Theatre and July 24 in Berkeley's First Congregational Church.
Opera, stage and film director James Darrah Black directs "Tolomeo." The cast of five includes countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in the title role; soprano Lauren Snouffer as Seleuce, Tolomeo's wife; soprano Nicole Heaston as Elisa, daughter of Araspe; countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim as Alessandro, Tolomeo's brother and bass-baritone Dashon Burton as Araspe, king of Cyprus.
"The power of music isn't just about beauty or technical brilliance, it's about what music can do to us, what it can move in us, what it can restore. ‘Tolomeo' is a wonderful opening statement of that idea," says Whelan, who also is a harpsichordist and bassoonist.
Handel composed "Tolomeo" at age 43. The opera seria- its full title is "Tolomeo, re d'Egitto" (Ptolemy, King of Egypt) - proved to be the last of 13 (14 if the one act he contributed to "Muzio Scevola" is counted) operas Handel composed for London's Royal Academy of Music.
By 1728, Handel was already the dominant force in London operatic life; but that year the landscape was shifting with the debut of Johann Christoph Pepusch's "The Beggar's Opera," which satirized the Italian opera popular in London. As a result of this change of taste, Handel reinvented himself, moving away from composing Italian operas to a focus on oratorios.
Noting a poignancy about when "Tolomeo" premiered, Whelan, 48, identifies with this moment in Handel's career.
"It's a work of tremendous refinement and emotional depth, written by someone at the height of their craft, and yet the world it was made for was already beginning to dissolve," he says. "What strikes me is that Handel's response to that pressure, over the following years, wasn't to retreat or compromise but to transform. There's something in that willingness to change while staying absolutely true to his artistic core I find genuinely inspiring at this point in my own career as I step into a new role and think about what I want this next chapter to be."
Whelan says that while opera seria - characterized by weighty, classical or mythological subjects, often with noble or heroic roles - gets a bad reputation because people imagine rigid convention, interchangeable parts and an emotional shorthand that feels remote, "Tolomeo" is a wonderful argument against that caricature.
"The da capo aria, which is opera seria's central structural unit, is in Handel's hands not a constraint but an extraordinary psychological tool: the return of the opening section after the contrasting middle isn't mere repetition, it's transformation," he explains. "The character has been through something and we hear the same music differently because of it."
Whelan, who won the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera in 2022 for conducting Vivaldi's rarely performed "Bajazet" in London, says "Tolomeo" also has an unusually intimate quality for an opera seria.
"The forces are relatively small, the drama is personal rather than grandiose, and the emotional range - jealousy, loyalty, despair, reunion - is handled with a directness that feels very close to us," he says. "Handel at his best makes you feel that these ancient characters are experiencing things for the first time, in real time, and ‘Tolomeo' is full of those moments."
PBO's 2026-27 season is called "The Power of Music," which also is the subtitle of its first subscription series performances on Nov. 11-14 featuring the U.S. premiere of the 1742 Dublin version of Handel's "Alexander's Feast."
The title speaks to Whelan's vision for PBO this season and beyond: "Music is more important than ever and its particular power is something that can't be replicated anywhere else: bringing people together in the same room, experiencing the same thing at the same moment, away from their individual screens and pods," Whelan says. "That feels like something the world genuinely needs right now, and there's something profound about the fact that Handel was writing about that same power three centuries ago. The connections across all that time is itself part of the point."
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale presents "Tolomeo" at 7:30 p.m. July 23 at the Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco and 7:30 p.m. July 24 at the First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley. Tickets are $40-$175 at (415) 295-1900 or philharmonia.org.
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