Judas Maccabeus是Handel的圣经演说家中这个名字的标题角色，但他并不是最有趣的人物。他甚至没有最好的音乐。

That’s because “Judas Maccabeus,” which concluded a four-performance run by Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale on Sunday, Dec. 8, isn’t a drama about individual people in the usual sense. It’s one of those Handelian works (“Israel in Egypt”is another) where the nation itself is the protagonist.

So sure, we get the military leader under whose banner the Israelites throw off the oppressive yoke of the Seleucid Empire, thus bequeathing us the minor holiday of Hanukkah (although not in this piece — that all comes later). His brother Simon pops up now and then as well, for no very obvious dramaturgical reason.

But the crux of “Judas Maccabeus” is the emotional journey of the Israelites themselves, a whipsaw alternation between sorrow and exultation, high hopes and crushing desolation. So the voices we care about, musically speaking, are those of the chorus and the two nameless Israelites who step forward to express the feelings of the multitudes like talking-head civilians in a newscast.

Sunday’s performance in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church did rejoice in tenor Nicholas Phan’s vivid and heroic performance as Judas. This was a clarion account, with the music emerging vigorously at the top of his range — never more excitingly than in the Act 2 aria “Sound an alarm!” where the trumpets and drums came aboard at the halfway point. And in the final stately elegy, “With honour let desert be crown’d,” Phan took the rare occasion to inject his appearance with a welcome note of pathos.

By the very nature of the score, though, it was the other performers who chiefly captured the listeners’ hearts and minds. As the Israelitish Man, Sara Couden deployed her huge and fluid mezzo-soprano to glorious effect in a range of vocal showcases — now tender and probing, now extravagantly athletic. One aria, “So rapid thy course is,” drove the audience into such convulsions of delight that applause burst out before the aria was even over.

She was splendidly matched by soprano Robin Johannsen, whose Israelitish Woman offered a wealth of pointed, crystalline singing. The Act 2 aria “From mighty kings he took the spoil,” a virtuoso display of technical prowess and expressive specificity, was only one delight among many.

Through it all, Bruce Lamott’s Philharmonia Chorale contributed singing of remarkable tonal heft and dramatic vigor – ripely mournful when the offstage battles had gone badly, full of triumphal color when they’d gone well. Baritone William Berger was a capable Simon, without ever making a very strong case for his character’s presence.

It’s those offstage battles, in the end, that make “Judas Maccabeus” something of a slog for all its musical riches. The few dramatic events that take place are out of the audience’s view, leaving us with only a series of reaction shots.

So it’s to the credit of Philharmonia and McGegan — who is now midway through hisvaledictory seasonafter 35 remarkable years as music director — that the piece came off as enticingly as it did.