Proms - Handel, Rinaldo

Prom 55, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Handel, Rinaldo

Glyndebourne brought their Rinaldo to the Proms and I had made it my nap selection from this year's programme in order to realize a minor ambition of seeing a Handel opera without going bankrupt by seeing it at Covent Garden. While Nigel Kennedy's Bach sounded great and I was also vastly impressed by the Shostakovich Violin Concerto by Lisa Batiashvili broadcast, I still think I was on the winner here. There was, of course, the Tallis Scholars, too, but I'm afraid perfection isn't quite good enough any more.

It wasn't exactly as one might have expected, being billed as 'semi-staged'. It was thoroughly staged, acted and choreographed as well as costumed. The conflict was realized as a school playground bullying issue which, somewhat riskily for the blood pressure of some of the middle-aged and respectable audience, involved some of the naughtiest schoolgirls one's wildest dreams might leave you wondering where that had all come from once you'd woken up and found it hadn't actually happened. Rinaldo was Sonia Prina, looking somewhat like a fourth form Frankie Valli, but this production if not the opera as a whole was one where the main role was not the one named in the title. Brenda Rae was strikingly (in more ways than you'd think) impressive as the dominatrix schoolmistress, Armida. And she was ably supported by the wicked furies. Oh, yes, and there were some blokes dressed as schoolboys as well.

So, it was somewhat more than a literal exposition of this drama of Christians and Saracens and a very playful interpretation visually. Which is not to say that anything was sacrified in the integrity of the music, which would have still sounded as wonderful as ever on the radio except one looked across at Martin Handley in the Radio 3 commentary box and wondered how he was explaining what had just happened on stage to the listeners at home. But still, the best known aria, Almirena's Lascia ch'io pianga, beautifully done by Anett Frisch, had a packed Albert Hall rapt in attentive hush. Normally, that would have been the highlight but Act 2 ended with Brenda Rae prowling first the stage, then a few rows of very nervous audience with her cane clearly bursting with disciplinary needs, before selecting an unwilling Prommer who politely demurred, and then the orchestra while all the time the magnificent director Ottavio Dantone was filling with continuo of a particularly obbligato nature, until it was indicated he should cease. It was magnificent theatre.

How much of this burlesque was originally written in by Handel and his librettist, Giacomo Rossi, for the first performance 300 years ago might be a subject for further academic enquiry but you don't get this much genuinely well-done entertainment in the more popular arts and this would be a tremendous advert for opera if only it could reach those who assume it's just opera, i.e. interminable melodramatic singing.

There were superb scenes of school involving bicycles, satchels and playground football as well as as much good (I mean 'bad', of course) corporal punishment as you could - ahem- shake a stick at.

Dantone's direction was superb. Radio 3's own Chi Chi Nwanoku was on bass, William Towers turned up as a wonderfully coiffeured Magician, Luca Pisaroni was a bad Argante, which was good, but even without the staging, the great visual jokes, the very contemporary theme of blatant pornography and specialist rubberwear, Handel's music is, of course, sublime and sumptuous. It has been said that when sending out speculative messages into space for other life forms to understand who we are on this planet it would be showing off if we sent them recordings of Bach. If we had sent them Handel, they'd be here by now.