Rinaldo

by George Frideric Handel

libretto by Giacomo Rossi from Aaron Hill after Tasso

seen semi-staged at the Barbican Centre Hall on 13 March 2018

Harry Bicket conducted the English Consort from the harpsichord with Iestyn Davies as Rinaldo, Jane Archibald as Armina, Sasha Cooke as Goffredo, Joélle Harvey as Almirena nd the Siren, Luca Pisaroni as Argante, Jakub Józef Orliński as Eustazio and Owen Willetts singing three minor parts.

Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata is a fanciful account of the final campaign of the First Crusade. Aaron Hill, managing the theatre at which the opera was first performed, prepared a synopsis and Giacomo Rossi rendered it in Italian. Handel, having arrived in London in 1710, wored quickly to compose this first sung-through Italian opera specifically for the London stage, and it was first performed in February 1711 to great acclaim.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

by Benjamin Britten 

(libretto by the composer and Peter Pears from Shakespeare's play)

seen at the Coliseum on 8 March 2018

Alexander Soddy conducts Christopher Ainslie as Oberon, Soraya Mafi as Tytania, Miltos Yerolemou as Puck and Joshua Bloom as Bottom in this second revival of Robert Carsen's production first seen at the Coliseum in 1995 and again in 2004.

In 2011 ENO performed a very different production of this opera, directed by Christopher Alden. Working against the usual cheerful mayhem of the libretto, but strangely still in keeping with the often eerie music (heavily influenced by Balinese gamelan, but by no means a pastiche of that style), Alden set the piece in a boys' boarding school where the squabble between Oberon and Tytania over the 'changeling boy' became a tussle between two teachers over a new favoured boy; the Athenian lovers were older boys attempting to encounter girls from a neighbouring school; the rude mechanicals were the crass ground staff and Puck was Oberon's current favourite about to be superseded by the newcomer. Theseus was an old boy of the school, evidently a previous favourite, watching in mute distress as the pattern of his own grooming by Oberon and subsequent displacement by the new boy was being repeated in the case of Puck. This all made for a troubling picture of endemic and cyclical abuse, which was extremely powerful even as it subverted one's expectations.