Tag: London Handel Festival

Ormisda (1730): George Frideric Handel and Friends

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Ormisda - Maria Ostroukhova

★★★★

(Opera Settecento at St George’s, Hanover Square, 28 March 2017)

I’m running slightly behind on London Handel Festival reports, but didn’t want to forget this remarkable Orsmida, dominated by an absolutely brilliant performance from the talented mezzo Maria Ostroukhova. Like Catone and Elpidia in previous Festivals, Ormisda is a pasticcio, pulled together by Handel using arias from other composers’ operas. Not only did this enable him to fill one of the slots in the 1730 opera season, easing his workload a little, but it also introduced London audiences to some top arias from the Continent. Ormisda pulls together some very enjoyable music by Hasse, Orlandini, Vinci, Leo and Giacomelli, to tell a classic opera seria tale of dynastic politics in ancient Persia.

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Faramondo (1737): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Faramondo

★★★

(Britten Theatre, 25 March 2017)

You can’t accuse Handel of not being productive. He wrote Faramondo while recovering from a stroke and, having finished it on Christmas Eve, began his next opera on Boxing Day. That would become Xerxes, one of his most enduringly popular scores, but Faramondo itself has never enjoyed the same acclaim as its younger sibling. There are perfectly good reasons for this, namely that the opera itself is a bit of a mess, but the students of the Royal College of Music have gamely taken up the gauntlet in this staged production, performed as part of the London Handel Festival. They’re accompanied by the London Handel Orchestra, with Laurence Cummings directing from the harpsichord; I also spotted Leo Duarte tucked in at the back with his trusty oboe.

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Elpidia (1725): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Elpidia

★★★½

(Opera Settecento, St George’s Hanover Square, 31 March 2016)

Herewith another post from the depths of the drafts folder, which I hope still may be of some interest. I’m keen to post it because I’m a great fan of Opera Settecento’s habit of unearthing rare and unusual operas and this performance featured some of my favourite young singers. Many apologies for its lateness, but it all happened around the time of my uncle’s death and I wasn’t really up to blogging at the time. But I had a few scribbled thoughts and wanted to jostle them into some sense of order, so that I can have a record of this enjoyable and particularly complex pasticcio.

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Giove in Argo (1739): George Frideric Handel

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Giove in Argo

★★★½

(Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music, 26 March 2015)

The final event of this year’s London Handel Festival for me was this staged version of the pasticcio opera Giove in Argo. Although Catone in Utica was also a pasticcio, the two differ because Giove is made up of arias and choruses from Handel’s own earlier operas rather than those of other composers. (However, as I’m still very much a Handel beginner, most of them felt new anyway!) It dates from 1739, the year after Xerxes, and represents one of Handel’s very last forays into Italian-language productions in London.

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Catone in Utica (1732): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Catone in Utica

★★★★

(Opera Settecento at St George’s, Hanover Square, 17 March 2015)

We’re all going to be hearing rather a lot about Catone in Utica this year, so let’s get things off to a roaring start with a performance I saw last night at St George’s, Hanover Square, formerly Handel’s parish church, as part of the London Handel Festival. Although the opera was put together by Handel for his 1732 season, it’s stretching the truth a bit to say that it’s by him. Handel had to fill out his programmes somehow and so, at this stage of his career, he often produced one or two pasticcio operas each season alongside his own works. These pasticci were assembled from arias by several other composers and tailored by Handel to meet the taste of his demanding British public.

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Semele (1744): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Semele

★★★½

(Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 10 March 2015)

Let the London Handel Festival commence! Things got underway in suitably regal style at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with a tale of divine seduction and boundless ambition that bore a moralistic coda: be careful what you wish for.

Nature to each allots his proper sphere, But that forsaken,
we like meteors err: Toss’d through the void, by some rude
shock we’re broke, And all our boasted fire is lost in smoke.

(Chorus: Act 3, Scene 7)

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