Electrifying: London Handel Festival’s In the Realms of Sorrow, at Stone Nest, reviewed

Hector Berlioz dismissed Handel as ‘that tub of pork and beer’ but it wasn’t always like that. Picture a younger, sexier Handel, rocking into Rome aged 22 and challenging Scarlatti to a keyboard duel. The Italian elite couldn’t get enough of Il caro Sassone, ‘the darling Saxon’, and he repaid them with 80-odd short Italian cantatas: little controlled explosions of character, colour and flamboyant melody in which his whole future career as a musical dramatist can be heard in concentrated form.

For the London Handel Festival, the director Adele Thomas staged four of these pocket-operas. The setting was Stone Nest, a domed former church, and the performance took place in the round. A period-instrument orchestra under Laurence Cummings (who seems to be game for anything) ringed the space, tears of glitter smudged upon their faces. There was a hint of smoke, plus flickering atmospheric lighting (by Josh Pharo) and surtitles projected on the walls. That was all it took – that and the raw emotive power of Handel’s music, as realised by five singers, a dancer and Thomas’s direction, which took words and music at face value and focused ever more intensely upon the characters’ pain.

So countertenor James Laing strolled palely about as a sinister maître d’. The dancer Jonathon Luke Baker, booted and bare-chested, moving with panther-like physicality as the eternal lover and betrayer. Between them, they provided narrative continuity, while improvisatory linking music by Héloïse Werner bridged the gaps between the individual cantatas. Handel himself, meanwhile, burned, languished and raged. Patrick Terry’s voice glowed and then cracked as Chloris pleaded with the shade of the dead Thyrsis. The vengeful Armida could be heard – faintly at first in the heights of the church, then swooping down, voice blazing. Nardus Williams was the soloist here, and she just gets better and better.

As Hero, Soraya Mafi poured hot, plangent gusts of grief over the body of Leander – straddling and then attempting to lift the inert Baker, all without any audible effect on her ardent, expressively shaped singing.