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. By the time we got to the third act, and were treated to projections of being in the cockpit of a bomber, and later of being on the receiving end of the bombs, I felt that the setting had run away with the story, which is essentially one more of those baroque messes for which, had Iris Murdoch been alive, she would have been the ideal librettist, in that a succession of characters appears, all desperately in love, but each with the wrong person.
Handel views those situations in a variety of ways, in Xerxes primarily with irony; though one must admit that Handel’s irony extends to writing the famous first aria, a glorious but solemn-sounding affair (the ‘Largo’) even when taken up to speed, as an apostrophe to a plane tree, or, in Conway’s production, his least forgivable pun, a plane, a Spitfire to be precise.
I could hear the words of the recitatives in Nicholas Hytner’s translation, but not of most of the arias, so I don’t know how jokey the text is. The costumes and most of the settings do seem designed for laughs, which were not forthcoming; though Xerxes himself, impressively acted and sung by Julia Riley, has too much dignity for a capricious and temperamental monarch. I felt that Riley had been left unsure about what she should make of the role overall. Conway, too, in his notes, refers to British films about the war in the air, about war heroism and love-in-war, but concludes ‘maybe they have not much influenced our response to this great opera’. Well, he should know.
The result is that, even more than usual with Handel, one lives from aria to aria, with the very rare duet and the wonderful final ensemble. The arias are unusual, however, in that few of them are da capo. They tend to be short and numerous, and therefore need to be delivered with maximum panache, since they are meant to be defining of character, or anyway defining of what the character singing them is suffering at that particular stage of his or her erotic odyssey. On the whole they are pungently delivered by these seven singers, and as usual with ETO one hopes to encounter them again as they climb the highly lubricated operatic pole. I could have done with more voluptuousness, however, from Romilda and Atalanta, objects of Xerxes’s and his brother Arsamenes’s
passion.
There is a tendency at present to treat Handel’s young women as if they were all meant to be sung by Danielle de Niese, and that leads not only to a narrowing of emotional range, but also to the idea that they are petulant and mischievous flirts. No doubt Handel used to be treated as a composer of relentlessly dignified works, but there’s no need to go to the other extreme.
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