Prom 55: Thursday 25th August 2011 (Handel - Rinaldo)

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Glyndebourne Festival Opera makes its annual visit to the Proms with a new production of Handel's Rinaldo. Handel sets the action in the first Crusade, giving ample opportunity for battle scenes, a love story, abduction, magic, disguise and ultimately, a gracious conquering hero. For Handel this was his first opera written for the London stage, so he was out to impress, filling it with vivid, exciting and poignant arias, including the famous 'Lascia ch'io pianga'.

The young knight Rinaldo is in love with Almirena, daughter of Goffredo, the leader of the Crusade. They are laying seige to the Saracens in Jerusalem, who are led by Argante. Argante's lover Armida is a powerful sorceress, and she attacks Rinaldo's forces and abducts Almirena.

The period performance specialist Ottavio Dantone directs the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a superb cast including Sonia Prina in the title role.

Handel: Rinaldo (semi-staged; sung in Italian)

Sonia Prina (Rinaldo)
Varduhi Abrahamyan (Goffredo)
Annett Fritsch (Almirena)
Brenda Rae (Armida)
Luca Pisaroni (Argante)
Tim Mead (Eustazio)
William Towers (A Christian Magician)
Glyndebourne Festival Opera
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Ottavio Dantone (director).

[Flosshilde]

Won't be able to hear this on the night as I'll be at 'Semiramide' in Edinburgh. I'll try & catch up with it on iPlayer.

[pilamenon]

Won't be able to hear this on the night as I'll be at 'Semiramide' in Edinburgh. I'll try & catch up with it on iPlayer.

I'll be there.

Was I just imagining it (as it always seems to happen), but have any of the singers been substituted from the original intended cast?

And does the Proms programme provide a libretto, or will there be surtitles?

[David Underdown]

Usually there is a separate booklet for the libretto provided with the programme (this usually means an extra 50p on the price, so £4 rather than £3.50)

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I'm not ceratin that the RAH is a good venue for baroque music, but I'm sure they'll make a go of it.

[jean]

It sounded wonderful on R3 - but what did it look like? The announcer made some mention of bicycles.

[amac4165]

The production is all a bit silly - as most reviews of the performance at Glyndebourne seem to say. Handel is camped up a lot these days - which works on some plot lines. The trouble here is that it is Crusader/Saracen story line doesn't really lend itself to the laughs. The only other production I have seen was a update to the current "middle east" and that didn't really work either.

It was well sung and apart from a longish 1st act - went through quite quickly - I am not sure if anything was cut. The 3rd act at around 45 mins did seem short for Handel.

The bikes appeared at the end of the 1st act - when they where going off to Jerusalem. However the Albert Hall stage seemed to provide more of a obstacle than the walls of Jerusalem ever would.

[pilamenon]

A thoroughly enjoyable evening. The villains, Armida, and Argante, were particularly good. Both well sung, and Luca Pisaroni's powerful and precise bass-baritone was particularly welcome. Brenda Rae's portrayal of Armida as a dominatrix was tremendous. There were no weak links, and I was impressed by counter-tenor Tim Mead and the Armenian singer Varduhi Abrahamyan. Let's face it, the opera is silly, so why shouldn't the production milk it for laughs? I thought it was coherently thought out and witty.

The orchestra were simply outstanding, although it would be good to hear the view of someone further back than I was - as, for example, the subtle continuo of the theorbo or baroque guitar might not have travelled. Wonderful solo contributions from the cello, the winds, the trumpets and drums, and some delicious harpsichord embellishments from Dantone himself. I would give the orchestra 10 out of 10, the singers 8 out of 10, and the production 8 out of 10.

[aeolium]

pilamenon, I agree about the orchestra and Dantone's long harpsichord solo - lovely, though I thought Venti, turbini was taken too fast in the first act (singer struggling to keep up and detail lost).

I'm glad I listened on R3 rather than in the hall as I find comic stage business quickly palls and silly though the opera plot is, it is not intended to be a comedy. Venti, turbini, Cara sposa, and Lascia ch'io pianga do not imo fit easily into a staging with St Trinian's, football games and bicycles. Handel is to my mind primarily a serious composer yet these days most of his operas are staged as comedies. I think that's a pity, but it is the nature of the age - seriousness is out and comedy is in.

[Anna]

Not about this Prom but maybe of interest to others, on the 25th TTN broadcast Handel's opera Tamerlano performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it starts at 1.00am, available on iplayer.

[longinus]

Aeolium:
But if you're a director, what do you do if the whole mind-set of the piece which you are directing is utterly foreign to all but a tiny fraction of your audience? The vast majority of pieces before 1720 (arbitrarily chosen date) are instrumental or sacred. Sacred we have no real problem with - since the common currency of the mass or ave maria/ave maris stella etc etc is easily assimilated (begging a lot of questions there). And instrumental music, though it presents all kinds of problems in terms of instrumentation, ornamentation, tempo and so on stirs little controversy outside academia. But baroque opera is like Jacobean drama - we can try really really hard to adopt the conventions, vocabulary, world-view of the age, but actually we can't - only a tiny tiny handful of academics can do this. So it's bizarre to pretend that any of us could sit through a totally "authentic" performance of any Handel opera. We just don't have the equipment. I saw the Glyndebourne production of Rinaldo on Monday and thought it worked brilliantly - and the key word is "worked" (and this is a very sophisticated audience). It managed to get the audience to commit to what was going on, and it didn't traduce any of the characters' emotions, so Lascia ch'io pianga was still heart-rending, as was Cara Sposa - (though if that was less affecting, that was to do with the singer, I think, excellent though she was in every other respect). So fundamentally I ask you - would you prefer Handel operas to exist solely on CD, or would you prefer them to be vital, involving dramatic events? (Yes, I know, that's a very slightly loaded question - but I hope you see what I'm driving at.)

[Chris Newman]

longinus,
I think it is merely a case of (forgive the cliché ) suspending your disbelief. It is some years since I watched a Handel opera but I used to love ENO under Charles Mackerras or Noel Davies when they presented works like Semelé and Julius Caesar with tongue in cheek directors. About twelve years ago my eleven year old son and I watched a production of Semelé and he thought it a mixture of "very lovely but very sexy with it, Dad". That was clearly a successful production. Involving conventions of Handel's day with happenings like Jupiter entering on a cut-out cloud it worked perfectly. If bicycles are used instead of horses in Rinaldo, so be it. Many fine productions use hobby-horses...Handel usually wins unless we have a frightened director out to shock with every movement and gesture for fear we don't notice his contribution.

[aeolium]

longinus, those are all good points and you have the great advantage that you have seen the production and I have not. I certainly would not want a "totally authentic performance" of this or any other Handel opera, even if such a thing were possible - I don't think the word 'authentic' is helpful at all about musical or dramatic performance. I agree that the mind-set of the piece is very foreign to most if not all the audience, but I think that's also true of many other even better-known works such as many Shakespeare plays, Rossini or Weber operas, Greek tragedy. And the historical setting of Rinaldo, though far distant in time, is not so detached from the world of Western incursions in the Middle East that we see in our own time - I would have thought it would not have been beyond the wit of a director to provide a contemporary update which did not require lashings of comedy to make palatable or comprehensible (perhaps a touch of magic realism for the sorcery). Shouldn't audiences use some imagination as well?

My main worry was that Handel's powerful and intense writing for the soloists would not be trivialised by the comic scenes, but you have said that in the staged production that didn't happen, so I am somewhat reassured.

I was reading Jonathan Keates' biography of Handel in which he records how the first London performances of Rinaldo drew the ridicule of Steele and Addison's Spectator: 'the Opera of Rinaldo is filled with Thunder and Lightning, Illuminations and Fireworks; which the Audience may look upon without catching Cold, and indeed without much Danger of being burnt; for there are several Engines filled with Water, and ready to play at a Minute's Warning, in case any such accident should happen'. They pointed out that the birds in Act 1 flew into the pit and shat upon the audience, and backdrops were not properly moved so that the sea suddenly appeared among the trees. At least the Glyndebourne production seems to have worked much better!

[pilamenon]

Very interesting posts.

I can see where aeolium is coming from on this, and of course by "humour" we're certainly not talking about rolling in the aisles. Equally, it would quickly become both tiresome and a travesty if every staging of a baroque opera had to be played for as many laughs as possible. However, as longinus says, this production definitely worked. I arrived in a rush (as usual ) without time to study the synopsis or purchase a libretto for the lengthy Act 1 - but the story made pretty clear sense; yes there was a welcome injection of humour, but not at every turn, and most importantly, the integrity of the big arias wasn't compromised by any of the comedy turns. An insistence on being deadly authentic to the spirit of the age every time might in my view diminish the potential audience for this wonderful music four centuries on, so the kind of generous interpretation seen here is in my view most welcome.

I would have loved to see it in its full splendour at Glyndebourne, as there were inevitably some rather clunky moments (and the odd trip!) in adapting it and particularly the bicycles to the RAH.

[pilamenon]

aeolium, I hadn't seen your last post when replying to the earlier ones, so it might seem as if I'm labouring the point.