No, pilamenon, it's good to hear that the semi-staged production seemed to work for you and doubtless many others. It was hard for me to judge as when I was listening there just seemed to be laughter at incongruous points (including during the lengthy harpsichord solo) but to be honest I wouldn't be too concerned what setting was used for Rinaldo as it is such a ludicrous plot, and I don't think it's by any stretch of the imagination one of Handel's better operas (dashed off in 2 weeks).
I suppose my point is that this is so far from being the case - isn't virtually every opera production nowadays teeming with anachronisms and updated to any other historical setting than the one intended? - that it would be a novel experience just once to see a production of an opera that attempted to re-imagine a setting that its contemporaries would have understood. Not for the purposes of being authentic, which as I said I think is a pointless enterprise, but for the purposes of trying to get into the thought-world of those distant writers and composers. Perhaps I am perverse in being interested in those very differences, that complete 'foreignness' of mind-set that longinus felt would be so off-putting to audiences. Just once, in a performance by an opera company prepared to lose some money
An insistence on being deadly authentic to the spirit of the age every time
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