Wonderful musical hokum
The second Glyndebourne of the season - Handel’s Semele. This is an opera which would need trigger warnings longer than its synopsis – so great fun!
First, the good things. This is beautifully sung, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment properly capturing Handel’s intentions. The libretto (William Congreve) was originally created for a 1701 Opera that was never performed – we are lucky that it was Handel that eventually brought it to market. Joélle Harvey (Semele); Jennifer Johnston (Juno) and Stuart Jackson (Jove) were all absolutely on point – but also a shout out for Samuel Mariño who sings Juno’s handmaiden Iris (soprano) as an alto, and one who out camps Larry Grayson in doing so – this becomes a (very) comic part. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen (the intentional alto Athamas) has the dominating build of a castrato and is the more convincing because of it.
And now the slightly more disconcerting. The set, a significantly raked and raised rough landscape (clothed differently across the 3 acts) is harsh and quite dull, pretending to be Thebes, a magical hide-away and (possibly) somewhere else, not entirely satisfactorily.
The Thebans dress as the 1950s Coronation St cast (with slightly incongruous, and drab, Laura Ashly style dresses for the wedding party), for some reason Juno enters as a Ming Empress, and Jove wears an acid yellow double breasted suit. In Acts 2 and 3 the chorus is in workaday black, which is less disconcerting.
I also couldn’t work out whether the Theban Chorus’s galumphing dance in Act 1 was intentionally galumphing. Handel is often traditionally staged with the actors just standing and singing, but not in this production where there was a lot of unconvincing promenading and movement, for no particular reason.
Overall however, mad-as-a-box-of-frogs book (good) beautiful music very well sung (another tick) and an ending where the new born Bacchus is hailed as the world’s Saviour – when you know the wine he is bringing isn’t Communion – couldn’t be better!