A huge slice of Handel: Tamerlano, Il Pomo d’Oro, Barbican
It is just possible that Il Gran Tamerlano (music by A. Scarlatti) might have been the first opera Handel saw in Italy. Handel would have recently arrived in Florence in…
Power-dressed and power hungry: Handel’s Agrippina at Iford
Bruno Ravella has updated the action of Handel’s Agrippina to the consumerist hell of the 1980s, giving us big hair, shoulder pads, cocaine and ruthlessness in spades. Agrippina, immaculately coiffured…
Lost in the woods: Handel’s Giove in Argo at the Royal College of Music
The Royal College of Music, with an enthusiastic and talented student cast, gave Giove in Argo a dramatic rebirth at the Britten Theatre. It was impossible not to enjoy the sheer…
Cut-and-shut Baroque: Handel’s pasticcio Catone in Utica at London Handel Festival
Like buses, you can wait many years to see a pasticcio, and then several come at once. Having only just reviewed the marvellous L’oracolo in Messenia by Vivaldi, I was…
Not quite heroic: Handel’s Hercules at the Barbican
The English Concert play beautifully, the chorus is in superb voice, but a disjointed cast of unconvincing singers mean Hercules never reaches heroic heights. Adapting Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Handel’s librettist…
Strong and stylish: Handel’s Ottone by English Touring Opera
Ottone was a great success for Handel in his lifetime, and the ravishing beauty of its music and exciting, dynamic plot shows us why. The consistently high production values of…
Self-sacrifice, then and now: Handel’s Theodora at the Barbican
Despite Nietzsche’s best efforts, God is not dead. Whether He is alive, beyond existence or merely too busy with the weather these days, there is no doubt that our world…
Mummy always knows best: Handel’s Agrippina, by English Touring Opera
This joyous production by English Touring Opera makes the most of the music, the characters, and the alternately hilarious and unsettling plot of Handel’s early masterpiece. Agrippina is an opera of…