As a gateway to opera on DVD, Handel has all the qualities that matter - an intimacy of scale even in his most dramatic works, roles that gain new vividness in DVD close-up, plots that can be strikingly (rather than pointlessly) updated, melodies that blossom afresh in their renovated surroundings.
But above all it is the intimacy that counts. This hit me first, long before DVD was invented, at Ledlanet Nights in Kinross-shire, where John Calder’s little opera festival half a century ago staged pioneering productions of Partenope and Agrippina, the first in Scotland and among the first in modern times, which displayed Handel’s sublimity in a way that the annual Messiah in the Usher Hall has never managed to do.
Crammed into that postage-stamp theatre-in-the-round, with the instrumentalists of Leonard Friedman’s Scottish Baroque Ensemble tucked into what seemed little more than a cupboard at the side, the works sprang instantly to life in a manner that Handel seldom did in big surroundings.
Years ahead of today’s great international Handel revival, the performances were triumphs of the most ingenious sort. Seeing these works again on DVD, in stagings from all over Europe, it is exhilarating to rejoice in them anew, in admittedly larger-scale productions but ones that DVD can bring into our homes at far less than opera-house prices.
From time to time this blog will be recommending DVDs worth buying, starting inevitably with David McVicar’s perfectly poised, inspiringly voiced Julius Caesar at Glyndebourne, made possible by the festival’s astute general manager, David Pickard, before anyone had thought of his becoming director (as was announced earlier this week) of the BBC Proms in London.
As the three-disc DVD reveals, McVicar’s was a Handel production that had everything - wit, anguish, the right pace, the right space, beauty, perception, fancy, resourcefulness, and William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (an outfit which, as it happened, David Pickard helped to create).
Sarah Connolly sings Caesar with a brilliance suggestive of the impeccable Claude Rains acting the part in the film of Caesar and Cleopatra. Angelika Kirchschlager and Patricia Bardon are Pompey’s grieving son and widow. Christophe Dumaux, that most seemingly eccentric of counter tenors, is the evil Tolomeo with Christopher Maltman as his lascivious henchman. Danielle De Nese is the bewitchingly saucy Cleopatra.
It is an ideal cast and the updating of the plot, which transforms Caesar’s troops into a sort of kilted Victorian garrison regiment, is superbly conceived. If you do not already possess a Handel DVD, this is unquestionably the one to start with. I shall be suggesting a few more in future blogs.
27 May 2015
But above all it is the intimacy that counts. This hit me first, long before DVD was invented, at Ledlanet Nights in Kinross-shire, where John Calder’s little opera festival half a century ago staged pioneering productions of Partenope and Agrippina, the first in Scotland and among the first in modern times, which displayed Handel’s sublimity in a way that the annual Messiah in the Usher Hall has never managed to do.
Crammed into that postage-stamp theatre-in-the-round, with the instrumentalists of Leonard Friedman’s Scottish Baroque Ensemble tucked into what seemed little more than a cupboard at the side, the works sprang instantly to life in a manner that Handel seldom did in big surroundings.
Years ahead of today’s great international Handel revival, the performances were triumphs of the most ingenious sort. Seeing these works again on DVD, in stagings from all over Europe, it is exhilarating to rejoice in them anew, in admittedly larger-scale productions but ones that DVD can bring into our homes at far less than opera-house prices.
From time to time this blog will be recommending DVDs worth buying, starting inevitably with David McVicar’s perfectly poised, inspiringly voiced Julius Caesar at Glyndebourne, made possible by the festival’s astute general manager, David Pickard, before anyone had thought of his becoming director (as was announced earlier this week) of the BBC Proms in London.
As the three-disc DVD reveals, McVicar’s was a Handel production that had everything - wit, anguish, the right pace, the right space, beauty, perception, fancy, resourcefulness, and William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (an outfit which, as it happened, David Pickard helped to create).
Sarah Connolly sings Caesar with a brilliance suggestive of the impeccable Claude Rains acting the part in the film of Caesar and Cleopatra. Angelika Kirchschlager and Patricia Bardon are Pompey’s grieving son and widow. Christophe Dumaux, that most seemingly eccentric of counter tenors, is the evil Tolomeo with Christopher Maltman as his lascivious henchman. Danielle De Nese is the bewitchingly saucy Cleopatra.
It is an ideal cast and the updating of the plot, which transforms Caesar’s troops into a sort of kilted Victorian garrison regiment, is superbly conceived. If you do not already possess a Handel DVD, this is unquestionably the one to start with. I shall be suggesting a few more in future blogs.
27 May 2015
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