What was the audience on? They tittered when the bicycles came on, nearly cried when the whip was unleashed and virtually pissed themselves when the warring sides in Handel's crusader fantasy Rinaldo started fighting it out with hockey and lacrosse sticks (I know! Too-oo funny!). After last year's randy bunnies, Glyndebourne's Prom visits are fast becoming the nights to bury bad comedy.
The one joke director Robert Carsen did get spot on was the libretto. I have some admiration for the drama's restlessness. But on the whole its unique mix of holy war, sorcery and Jackie Collins-like sauce means it clings to the cliff of seriousness with the tips of its fingers. Carsen made great play of this, setting the absurd fantasy within the wide-open fields of a schoolboy's daydream. It was an inspired conceit that freed the activity from the shackles of intellectual high-mindedness, cultural sensitivity and plausibility and dived the work into some deliciously puerile daydreams: including a niqab strip.
The dastardly attempt by the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem to foil the Christians' invasion plans (led by Rinaldo) by stealing Rinaldo's sweetheart, Almirenda, is reimagined through the prism of the playground. School tyke Rinaldo dreams that the reason why he can't get his girl is because the world is against him, his subconscious morphing his own trials into the larger bust-up of the Medieval Middle East.
The only problem to Carsen's irreverent tack (beyond the whiffy humour) is that the music clearly speaks to so much more than just a schoolboy's cartoon-strip reveries. Rinaldo is one of Handel's finest, most peppy scores. Its arias are sharp, rangy and bejewelled, exploring much emotional territory with economical means. When combined with an excellent cast, as last night, it's Handelian nirvana.
A captivating, boyishly loose-limbed Sonia Prina (Rinaldo) was the biggest draw. Her voice was extraordinary. Perhaps too extraordinary. She skewered her coloratura with such unforgivable ease that some of the struggle that we demand of this character (especially in "Venti, turbini", which was otherwise, in terms of technique, as accomplished as you're ever going to hear live) didn't come through.
Luckily the others did do turmoil. Rinaldo's girlfriend Almirenda (the brilliant Annett Fritsch) coloured her "Lascia ch'io pangia" with a terrific cussing accentation. Varduhi Abrahamyan's troubled Goffredo plumbed the depths after a shaky start. An impressively leather-clad Brenda Rae was a little too comfortably brilliant in voice to pull off the baddie role of Armida. But Luca Pisaroni's hit the spot with a great Argante, who kicked off the dazzle with a stunning "Sibillar gli angui". And young Tim Mead was a revelatory Eustazio - a countertenor to watch.
There were irritations. I am a prima-le-parole man at heart, yet the way the sound effects in particular rode roughshod over the fine orchestral playing from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was pretty outrageous. To plaster pre-recorded bird song over a delicate duet evoking aviary calls for recorders felt little short of criminal.
But then if the conductor Ottavio Dantone will play around with the work in such an unmusical fashion, with ludicrous exaggeration of speeds (which even the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment couldn't keep up with) and textures that were either presented hazy and soft or clipped to near baldness, it's hardly surprising others followed his lead. Or maybe this absurd parody of period playing was another rib-tickler I wasn't getting?
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