Alexandra Coghlan

Whose opera is it anyway?

Obscurity is the order of the week: London Handel Festival offer up Handel's pasticcio Elpidia and oratorio Alexander Balus, while London Mozart Players reconstruct Mozart's Goose of Cairo

Disguises and mistaken identities are a staple of opera, but usually as part of the onstage, not the offstage, action. So what are we to make this week of a Handel opera that isn’t by Handel at all, and a Mozart opera that was largely composed in 1990? As usual in the opera house, there are good — if complicated — explanations.

Every year the London Handel Festival tests the theory that forgotten operas are forgotten for a reason, rooting around the darkest corners of the composer’s output to find some abstruse treasures for their audience. This year they’ve outdone themselves, with a performance by Opera Settecento of Elpidia — an opera not heard since its initial run in 1725. The reason? Elpidia is a pasticcio, a collection of arias mostly by Vinci (with a few also from Capelli, Lotti and Orlandini) strung together with original recitatives by Handel.

Such a cut-and-paste approach might not suit our purist, contemporary idea of artistic creation, but the result is superb. Not bravura, coloratura superb, but psychologically sensitive, with melodies designed to emote rather than impress. This is music that transcends (even if it can’t quite transform) a frankly weak plot involving Romans, Goths and a rather half-hearted love triangle. The only problem is that it’s a score that sends you home dying to hear Vinci’s Rosmira and Ifigenia — sources for the greater portion of the arias — rather than revisit Handel’s own operatic collage.

The Handel Festival’s stubborn refusal to offer surtitles meant that it was all but impossible to follow the plot, forcing conductor Leo Duarte and his cast (hidden behind both the orchestra and a wall of music stands) to sustain the drama on a purely musical level. Countertenors Rupert Enticknap (Olindus) and Joe Bolger (Ormonte) made a feisty pair of lovers, their rivalry heightened by strikingly different vocal personalities.

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