Theodora at Glyndebourne

What’s this?  Amid TV cameras, excited young supporters are assembling to hear a persuasive politician, with armed bodyguards on each side of him, deliver his message. In the course of his speech he fakes a heart attack, is revived by medics, leaps back to his feet, and continues his harangue.

The reinvention of Handel’s tragic oratorio by the American director Peter Sellars is underway. The singers employ Sellars’s own private, distracting sign language, also used by him in other productions, to convey their emotions. At Glyndebourne in the 1990s, with Wiilliam Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the transformation of this late, long neglected masterpiece was a hit. Dawn Upshaw, Loraine Hunt Lieberson, and the robust counter tenor David Daniels represented Christian morality. The Scandinavian baritone Frode Olsen was the dictatorial voice of evil. It was not the first time a Handel oratorio had been staged  as an opera, but it was done with supreme conviction, as this  three-disc DVD - where it is joined by a no less arresting renovation of the opera  seria  Rodelinda and a jeu d’esprit concocted under the title of A Night with Handel, with the composer’s modern biographer Jonathan Keates as narrator, strikingly continues to confirm.

Rodelinda, directed by Jean Marie Villegier in terms of a 1920s Hollywood monochrome film, again with Christie as the most perceptive of conductors and with the superb  Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role,   offers similar evidence that Handel updates more satisfyingly than anyone else.

Each aria and ensemble is like a scene from a great silent movie brought to vivid vocal life, complete with subtitles. The plot profits from its melodramatisation as an episode from fascist Italy. The slow unfurling of the story, both emotional and witty, remains as riveting as it must have been when Glyndebourne unveiled  its take on baroque costume drama in the 1990s.

If you do not already possess it in your DVD  collection, buy it now from Amazon at bargain price.
30 May 2015