Handel
Rachel Halliburton
Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival, an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the composer’s early cantatas about thwarted love and mined them for all their incandescent rage and poisoned wistfulness.The staging took place in the acoustically and architecturally exquisite Stone Nest on Shaftesbury Avenue – a nineteenth century chapel with an umbrella dome that closed in the early Eighties to become a nightclub. That decadent past Read more ...
Harry Bicket
Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.Perhaps a period of forced introspection is a positive thing if it helps clarify what is truly important and what isn’t. For musicians, whose work is by definition a communal event, it was a strange period; endless time to practise and study, but with apparently nothing to practise and study for. Many groups understandably decided to hunker down and reduce their activities and ambitions. The English Concert had a different concept: if our world was about to Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
English Touring Opera opened its spring season with Handel's Giulio Cesare – not a new production, but in a new guise. Typically for Baroque opera, the version of the work premiered in 1724 was very long. ETO previously took up the challenge by staging it in full over two nights. They then cut it down to a more manageable three hours (including interval), but that tour was interrupted by Covid, so now it's back for a full run.Most of Handel's recitative is gone (thankfully), and the distribution of arias among the lead roles seems a little arbitrary, but a good sense of pace is retained. For Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A dream pairing of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and early-keyboard wizard Kristian Bezuidenhout marked St Cecilia’s Day at the Wigmore Hall with a programme that celebrated music made not in the Black Forest but beside the Thames.Both halves of their concert matched works by Purcell with the fruits of Handel’s early years in London. The German period-instrument stars, with a gifted group of home-grown singers, were directed from the harpsichord (and Baroque organ) by the South African-born Australian fortepianist. Together, they managed to make a cosmopolitan case for musical continuity in Read more ...
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 ...