Olivier Award winner, Peter Whelan, is known as one of the most dynamic and versatile exponents of historical performance of his generation.

He is currently the Artistic Director of Irish Baroque Orchestra and Curator for Early Music of Norwegian Wind Ensemble. In addition to taking up the role of Artistic Partner with National Symphony Orchestra Ireland in January 2026 and becomes Music Director of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra from the 2026-27 season.

This summer he makes his debut at the Caramoor Festival with the Philharmonia Baroque, conducting “Tolomeo,” one of Händel’s rarely performed works.

Ahead of his performance at the Festival, Whelan spoke to OperaWire about the misconceptions of early music, “Tolomeo,” and the cast he has put together for the performance.

OperaWire: What are you looking forward to about performing at Caramoor with Philharmonia Baroque for the first time?

Peter Whelan: Almost everything. Caramoor is one of those rare venues that seems to have been designed specifically with music in mind rather than as an afterthought, and there’s a genuine intimacy there that suits Baroque opera beautifully. But beyond the venue, this is the beginning of something significant for me. Taking up the Music Director role with Philharmonia Baroque is one of the most exciting chapters of my professional life, and I’m at that wonderful early stage of a relationship where you’re still discovering each other. I find that energy feeds directly into performance.

OW: The performance this year will be of “Tolomeo.” Tell me about this work and why you chose it?

PW: “Tolomeo” is one of Händel’s most psychologically intense operas, and one of the most unjustly neglected. First performed in 1728, at the very end of the first great King’s Theatre period, the drama is extraordinarily compressed: betrayal, poisoning, assumed death, disguise, madness, reunion. It has the quality of a late Shakespeare play, where tragedy is only narrowly averted and the reunion, when it comes, feels almost unbearably hard-won.

This is not “Giulio Cesare,” which has enormous ceremonial sweep. “Tolomeo” is chamber-scale emotionally, and that felt right for Caramoor, and right for a new relationship between a conductor and an orchestra that is itself in the process of deepening.

OW: How does it differ from other Händel pieces?

PW: The public image of Händel can flatten him into the man who wrote the Hallelujah chorus: triumphant, extrovert, magnificent. And he is all of those things. But “Tolomeo” reveals a completely different Händel: inward, chromatic, willing to sit in extraordinarily painful harmonic territory for extended periods. There are moments where the harmonic language is almost unsettling, where Händel seems to be reaching for something that won’t fully resolve.

The formal constraints of opera seria seem to produce a kind of intensity under pressure here, like a compressed spring. The da capo arias feel less like ornamental repetitions and more like emotional reckonings.

OW: What are some of the biggest challenges of conducting Händel? And what are some of the misconceptions about his music?

PW: The biggest misconception is that it’s easy, that because the textures are transparent and the structures clear, the music will more or less conduct itself. The opposite is true. Precisely because there is nowhere to hide in Händel, every decision is audible: tempo, articulation, ornamentation, the weight you give to a bass line.

The other misconception is that historically informed performance practice is primarily about restriction. I think it’s actually enormously liberating. Understanding the rhetorical conventions Händel was working within, the way affect was codified in his time, the flexibility available to performers around the written text: all of that opens the music up. When a singer understands why a particular ornament in a da capo aria is not just decoration but a form of dramatic commentary, everything changes.

For me as a conductor, the greatest challenge is pacing. The conductor’s job is partly architectural: to feel the dramatic arc across an evening so that the cumulative emotional effect is greater than any individual moment.

OW: You have a starry cast. How did you choose them and did previous collaborations influence the process?

PW: “Tolomeo” presents particular casting challenges because the vocal writing is so demanding and so specific. Händel wrote for exceptional singers at the King’s Theatre, and the parts require a combination of technical agility and deep emotional intelligence that isn’t common. The process began with an honest assessment of what the music actually needs.

Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in the title role is simply one of the finest countertenors working today, and the part needs exactly the combination of lyrical beauty and dramatic intensity that he brings. Lauren Snouffer as Seleuce is a soprano I’ve long admired for the way she inhabits text: there’s never a moment where the music and the words feel like separate things. Kangmin Justin Kim as Alessandro brings exceptional refinement, and Dashon Burton grounds the whole drama with real authority as Araspe.

Nicole Heaston and I first worked together at San Francisco Opera in Gluck’s “Orfeo,” and I knew from that experience that she was exactly the artist you want beside you in this kind of repertoire: her intelligence and vocal security make a role debut feel less like a leap of faith and more like an inevitability. Opera at its best is an ensemble art, and trust, the kind that develops through shared experience, is genuinely irreplaceable.

OW: How do you approach Baroque music? What are the most important qualities you try to bring out?

PW: Speech. The most important thing I bring to Baroque music is an obsession with the relationship between music and language, with the idea that this music is fundamentally rhetorical: always, in some sense, trying to say something specific and trying to move someone. Affekt in the Baroque sense isn’t just mood or atmosphere; it’s an active force, something music was understood to literally produce in the listener’s body. That idea gives every phrase a purpose.

Beyond that: clarity of texture, which is not the same as thinness; flexibility of rhythm and pulse, which is not the same as unsteadiness; and emotional courage. The willingness to let a slow movement be genuinely, uncomfortably slow when the music demands it, or to let a dramatic passage hit with real physical force. Baroque music does not need to be polite.

OW: Is there a particular piece you are keen to conduct in the future that you have not yet done?

PW: Many. The Baroque repertoire is so vast and so much of it remains rarely performed that I feel I could work for several lifetimes and still be discovering things. But if I’m naming one: Rameau’s “Castor et Pollux,” which I think is one of the genuine masterpieces of eighteenth-century music. The orchestral language is extraordinary, harmonically daring in a completely different way from Händel, almost hallucinatory at times. That’s a project I hope is not too far away.