Handel
David Nice
Handel’s audiences must have taken a very long time to settle – at least an act, to judge from the mostly inconsequential music of Alcina’s first hour. Lovely: we’re on an enchanted isle where puritanical people have been transformed into animal-headed courtiers, and a love-imbroglio merits only a “so what?” Richard Jones and his singers keep it lively and focused, but the bounce needed from Christian Curnyn and the Royal Opera House Orchestra doesn’t come.Eventually the charm of the personalities and the consistency of the staging win over, but it does show how much a conductor’s pacing Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During the final act of Tamerlano, James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera has the titular tyrant lead a captive king around the stage on a chain. Given the oppressive, deadlocked mood of Handel’s opera and this interpretation, you may recall Pozzo and Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: that frozen dialectic of master and slave in which power traps its holder as much as its victim. Conway’s farewell gift to ETO, after two decades of high achievement as artistic director, Tamerlano is sung with terrific verve and dramatic credibility by an impressive young cast. This Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Playhouse Sessions: Bjarte Eike, Barokksolistene (Rubicon)The Playhouse Sessions is a follow-up to the irresistible Alehouse Sessions, in which Bjarte Eikke and his Barokksolistene recreate a 17th century London pub gig, where sea shanties and rumbustious dance tunes rub shoulders with Purcell. I was very disappointed to miss the recent live London outing for both these projects (reviewed by David Nice for theartsdesk) and while nothing can quite match being in the room, the Playhouse Sessions in recorded form still offers more musical revelation and sheer fun than anything else I Read more ...
Simon Thompson
It’s not an opera, of course, but of all Handel’s oratorios, Saul is probably the one that is best suited to being presented as an actual drama. Several productions, most notably Barrie Kosky's at Glyndebourne, have shown how it can work on stage, but this performance at the Edinburgh International Festival proved that you can have a great evening’s drama with nary a prop or costume in sight.The key to Saul’s dramatic success is partly the condensed nature of its story but, more importantly, the vast range of music colours that Handel draws upon. It’s the most diverse orchestra he used in any Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like many people, I grew up with cut-and-paste Handel. It could take decades before you found out where that shiny snippet of a childhood earworm truly belonged.A full-length Solomon, for instance – as delivered by The English Concert with a luxury handful of soloists at the Proms – will reveal that the so-called “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” (named, it seems by Thomas Beecham) takes place just after an extraordinary middle act. In it, two “harlots” compete before the wise king for custody of a babe both claim as theirs. Exercising that famous judgment, Solomon orders the kid to be bisected Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing the Grange Festival production of Tamerlano the other day, I noted the difficulty Handel poses the modern director with his byzantine plots and often ludicrous love tangles, expressed through music of surpassing brilliance but mostly stereotyped forms. But at least Tamerlano is a comprehensible story with its feet planted firmly in a sort of reality. In Alcina earthbound reality is hardly anywhere to be seen. We are on a magic island ruled by the enchantress of the title, who disposes of her many lovers by turning them into wild beasts or rocks, trees or rivers. Bradamante Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Handel’s operas have long posed, and still pose, severe problems for the modern theatre, and especially the modern director – all those endless streams of wonderful but emotionally more or less generalised arias hitched to interchangeable characters in fabricated love stories about crusaders or Roman emperors or oriental potentates.But they can suddenly explode into true music drama where the cardboard dramatis personae suddenly become real and human and acquire minds and feelings. Tamerlano, sandwiched in 1724 between two of Handel’s greatest operas, Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda, is a Read more ...
David Nice
You know great singing when you hear it. In Handel, for me, that was when Lucy Crowe took over a Göttingen gala back in 2013; in Mozart, most recently, it came from Emily D’Angelo making her Royal Opera debut in La clemenza di Tito. Last night, in an opera of genius from first note to last, both shone, but neither eclipsed other performances or took the spotlight from the ravishingly beautiful playing of Harry Bicket’s English Concert.Handel's main roles were divided between five women’s voices of outstanding quality, delivering the sort of performances where singing seems as natural as Read more ...
graham.rickson
This new production of Handel’s Alcina opens well, with no preamble, the protagonists’ arrival on the island inhabited by the titular sorceress suggested by footage of rushing water projected onto the backdrop. This is billed as Opera North’s first sustainable production, the costumes, furniture and props all second-hand.Designer Hannah Clark’s “Heaven on Earth” is little more than a patch of linoleum littered with scruffy office chairs and the characters are in modern dress, their mismatched outfits seemingly sourced from a charity shop. Thankfully, video designer William Galloway’s Read more ...
David Nice
Some of Handel's late London oratorios, like the indestructible Semele, work well as fully staged operas. Others, usually the ones which swap mythology for the sacred, need dramatic help. Theodora is one of them, though Peter Sellars' now-legendary Glyndebourne production had a once-in-a-lifetime intensity. The singing if not the acting is more fitfully stunning here, but Katie Mitchell just about pulls off one of her most vivid and focused reimaginings.This is certainly her best Handel staging to date, even if advance puffery about its extreme nature turns out to have been exaggerated. We Read more ...
graham.rickson
Handel: Six Concerti Grossi Van Diemen’s Band/Martin Gester (BIS)I wanted to hear this disc purely on the basis of the group’s name. My instincts didn’t let me down. Martin Gester and Van Diemen’s Band, (based, naturally, in Tasmania) give vibrant accounts of Handel’s Op. 3 Concerti Grossi, works which were never conceived as a set by the composer but were surreptitiously assembled without Handel’s knowledge by a crafty London publisher in 1734. As with Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, each one is differently scored and the number of movements varies. These effervescent, joyous readings Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This time last year, the moment I knew things were really bad was when the Dunedin Consort cancelled Messiah. All performances since the summer of 2020 had been online films, but Dunedin cancelled even their online Messiah because it would involve performers travelling from all corners of the UK to do it. Sure enough, a couple of days later, what we then called the “Kent variant” appeared, and the grim winter lockdown began.Fast forward to December 2021 and another Covid shadow is hanging over us, though now we’re enlightened enough to name it after a Greek letter. Jo Buckley, the Dunedin Read more ...