How not to do Handel – an object lesson

Aci, Galatea e Polyfemo/Brockes Passion

London Handel Festival

★★★☆☆

When Handel’s oratorio Aci, Galatea e Polyfemo was premiered to celebrate a ducal wedding in Naples, it was accompanied by a feast in his honour. In London, kings and noblemen also feasted to his music, sometimes while being ferried downstream to the theatre.

This was the watery ‘Handel experience’ which director Jack Furness and his team sought to recreate with their 21st century production of that oratorio, ferrying us downstream from Westminster to Poplar, and serenading us with Handel’s music along the way.

The plot, mined from Greek antiquity, concerns the jealous monster Polypheme who murders a shepherd, Acis, for daring to love the nymph Galatea; Acis’s blood is turned by sympathetic gods into a clear running river.

But Furness and co are intent on muddying the water. We are asked to watch not an oratorio, but the making of a ‘performative film’ (whatever that is) about that oratorio. And we are asked to pull our weight in giving the performers ‘the energy necessary’ to combat the ‘alienation in front of the camera’ which they have mystifyingly identified as cinema’s curse.

But the alienation is emphatically ours. The film-makers are constantly shifting their equipment, dodging in and out of character, having little hissy-fits, and outnumbering the singers on a crowded little stage, with an out-of-sync video adding another layer of irritation. It’s often impossible to work out who’s who, and what’s going on, in this farrago of self-defeating pretentiousness.

So why is this show getting three stars, rather than an ignominious zero? Because this is also the best performance of a Handel opera in years, with three outstanding singer-actors.

Close your eyes and just listen. Mary Bevan’s airy purity of line beautifies every aria from Acis, while contralto Claudia Huckle is thrillingly forceful as Galatea, and baritone Callum Thorpe’s Polypheme makes the earth shake: while stumbling through the film-makers’ minefield, this valiant trio don’t miss a beat. Meanwhile, under the inspiring direction of Laurence Cummings, the London Handel Orchestra demonstrates what a fabulous work this seldom-performed piece is.

The Handel Festival’s other trouvaille this year  was the Brockes Passion, presented in the magnificent Baroque church at the end of the street where Handel lived. That too was a profound experience, which The English Concert under Harry Bicket’s direction delivered with passion and brilliance, with its young soloists – most notably Jess Dandy, Josh Lovell, and Ashley Riches – singing arias of refreshingly unfamiliar beauty. That event was being filmed, and should make a great DVD.

 

 

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