West Edge limps to a close with ‘Agrippina’

[...] the final installment of the company’s summer season, a labored and unsteady account of Handel’s early “Agrippina,” landed with a dull, dispiriting thud at the abandoned 16th Street train station in Oakland.

Friday’s performance, the second of three, unveiled a manic and ill-focused production staged by the company’s general director, Mark Streshinsky, which transmuted a sharply satirical take on the romantic and political machinations of ancient Rome into farce.

Both are works by 24-year-old budding geniuses that treat the confluence of wealth, power and sexuality with a combination of tart skepticism and genuine sympathy.

Two lovers, Poppea (the crystalline soprano Hannah Stephens) and Ottone (countertenor Ryan Belongie, bringing limpid purity to the role), want nothing more than each other, but get drawn into the political drama more or less against their will.

The production’s one brilliant stroke comes during the final moments, when the opera’s blithely happy ending is accompanied by supertitles reminding us of the truly seedy and monstrous fates that awaited the characters’ real-life historical counterparts.

Friday’s performance featured a handful of glorious vocal turns, particularly Gartshore’s piercing account of Agrippina’s stark cry of inner anguish, “Pensieri, voi mi tormenta” — the opera’s fiercest and most concentrated stroke of musical drama.