Man-Handeled: Rodelinda at ENO
Rodelinda
English National Opera
London Coliseum
Dress Circle C11, £20 (secret seat)
26 October 2017
ENO page
An inbuilt Handel prejudice of unknown origin prevented me from seeing Richard Jones’s much shouted-about production of Rodelinda when it was new. I’m older now and increasingly ashamed of this rootless antipathy, almost always proved wrong, and so I screwed my courage to the sticking place and bought a ticket this time round (only one, as I didn’t want to subject a guest to what my inner soul told me would be a long and turgid evening).
Nul points, inner soul, once again. The evening was very enjoyable, a fact for which Handel doesn’t quite take all the credit. Jones’s production is smart and snazzy and ruthlessly entertaining, and might have caused me anguish were I a Handel purist. As it is, I was on-board with the open mocking of the Baroquely silly story, and didn’t even mind the filmed interludes, and the ghastly recorded music they brought with them, introduced only to explain the set design (by Jeremy Herbert, on superb form).
The setting of Milanese gang wars works impressively well and satisfyingly precipitates the extraordinarily successful inversion of the triumphalist ending, an inspired turn that nears the invention of Jones’s take on Meistersinger. The general atmosphere of giddy gadding is occasionally punctured by moments of stillness, most effectively with the gorgeous duet that ends Act II. In fact the only thing I didn’t like were the treadmills (fucking treadmills): I get that they wanted something to animate the stage while the frontcloths were down, but the end result looks more like a torture machine for singers already fully occupied by Handelian coloratura.
The singers were mostly good. The stand-outs were the two counter-tenors, Tim Mead as Bertarido and Chris Lowrey as Unulfo, each pleasingly loud, secure in the fast notes and confident presences on stage. Mead isn’t always quite on the note and Lowrey has a cute tendency to bob his knees while singing, which he should try to stop doing, but they are both exciting evidence of the strength and health of the modern counter-tenor. Susan Bickley as Eduige sounds like herself, and Juan Sancho as the delicate Grimoaldo and Neal Davies as Garibaldo do well. I’m afraid I’m a bit concerned about Rebecca Evans, who took the title role: her glorious voice was sometimes in evidence as of old, but at other times has a tendency to sound pinched at the top.
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