Lutenist Brandon Acker on Ester & recitatives

While arias seem to be the highlight of an opera for most audience members, as a theorbo/lute player, my favorite moments come from the recitative. Depending on the opera, the recitative can comprise at least half of the full show and is what truly drives the narrative of the story.  As a continuo player, my job is to read the same bass notes as the cello but also to  improvise chords and amplify the meaning of the text with how I play. Therefore, the first step of preparing an opera involves writing in a translation of the text. Next, I sing and play through every recitative to understand the emotional meaning and then think of ways to "text paint." For example, if the singer suddenly yells "traitor," I can strum a loud chord. However, if the singer says something sweet to a loved one, I can improvise a soft and sweet melody that echoes the notes they just sang. The magical thing is that this will change from performance to performance and the harpsichord is improvising at the same time.  I recommend that audiences not think about what we are doing in the same way you would view a 19th-century string orchestra reading from parts; we’re more like a jazz ensemble making up their parts on the spot.

My favorite part of Ester is the very end, when we witness the downfall of Aman in his soliloquy. Musically, Stradella is changing keys abruptly and without warning to mirror the intensity of Aman's realizations of the profundity of his own demise. As a group, we decided to further amplify these contrasting emotions by orchestrating the jarring and sudden mood changes by using different instruments. When Aman declares at the end, "Oh fortune, you have brought me to death's lap," we stripped the orchestration down to only voice and theorbo to express the vulnerability and fragility of his mental state.

Learn more about Haymarket’s 2025 performance of Stradella’s Ester.

About the author

Brandon Acker is a classical guitarist and specialist on early plucked instruments such as the Baroque guitar, theorbo, lute, and archlute. His latest passion has been to run his successful Youtube channel, which provides educational content about historical lutes and guitars, guitar tutorials, and performance videos. His channel now has over 481,000 subscribers and 40 million views.  In 2020, he and his wife founded the online music school Arpeggiato.

Brandon’s varied performance career started with his playing electric guitar in metal bands and has progressed to his current main focus of researching and performing on early plucked instruments from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He has toured extensively through England, Canada, Scotland, and Wales, and has performed with notable groups such as Apollo’s Fire, the Leipzig Baroque Orchestra, Piffaro, the Joffrey Ballet, the Chicago Philharmonic, the Newberry Consort, Haymarket Opera Company, Music of the Baroque, Third Coast Baroque, Opera Lafayette, and Bella Voce.

About The Haymarket Review: This new digital publication including thoughts about  the work produced by Haymarket is designed to deepen our connection to audiences, nurture and feed audience curiosity about historical performance, offer critical opinions and thoughtful reflections on our performances, and provide a forum for Haymarket and its audience to connect through sharing insights, opinions, learning, and expertise.