Xerxes

English Touring Opera, under the inspiring directorship of James Conway, is the most energetic and enterprising operatic company in the country, not only taking three operas round the country this autumn, and another couple next spring, but also touring sacred works by Buxtehude, Gesualdo and Bach to 15 destinations, mainly ecclesiastical. ETO is working with a new orchestra for its baroque repertoire, a director-free group formed earlier this year calling itself the Old Street Band.

On the second night of Handel’s Xerxes, which I went to at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre, it seemed to be a first-rate group, and with Jonathan Peter Kenny conducting incisively, sometimes perhaps a bit too much, this fairly lengthy piece almost sped by. If, even so, I found myself less than fully engaged, some at least of that is my fault — how much is a question I ponder whenever, nearly, I go to a Handel opera, without ever being able definitely to give an answer that satisfies my artistic conscience.
It’s a long time since I’ve seen an opera by Handel that wasn’t set in a period remote from that envisaged by the composer and his librettist, and normally in the present or the recent past. James Conway, director of this Xerxes, has set it during the second world war, evoking the same atmosphere as such movies as The Way to the Stars or The Dam Busters.

The first act takes place outside a Nissen hut, the RAF station’s sick bay. King Xerxes is a pilot and in uniform, though his rank is not one that an ex-RAF man such as me could identify — but it seemed to be strangely low. Perhaps it’s my memories of the RAF and of the second world war that make me resent a little the way it served, or failed, to enhance the action of the opera.