Oreste       Louise Winter
Ifigenia     Jennifer Smith
Ermione      Lynda Russell
Pilade       Joseph Cornwall
Toante       John Rath
Filotete     Victoria Simmonds


Conductor    Laurence Cummings
Director     Tom Hawkes

English Bach Festive Baroque Orchestra, Dancers

Handel's Oreste was performed during his first season at Covent Garden, in
December 1734. This performance, in the nifty but functional and
subterranean Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, was the faintest of
gestures towards the house's greatest resident composer. The ENO, of
course, cocked a resounding snook by apparently putting everyting possible
into the cast and production of David McVicar's Alcina, a far greater work
from the same Covent Garden season. And this "authentic" production tried
to do straight what McVicar had fun with -- notably the burnished
Rubensesque sets and the mannered baroque dancing. The soldiers' dance at
the end of the second act of Oreste was far camper than the Madness
inspired, but amazingly similiar, pranks of Alcina's minions in act one at
the ENO.

But then Oreste is less of work than you might expect. The librettist pulls
out the mistaken-identity romance plot from Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris
and throws in Hermione, who comes looking for Orestes and is wooed and
threatened by the barbarian king Thoas. There is no sense of the profound
fear in Euripides' play (and in Gluck's Iphigenia) of people's innate
potential for violence and the way it threatens civilization, though Handel
and Morrell dealt with the same theme powerfully in Jephtha a few years
later. To be fair, Euripides' play is extremely cleverly constructed, and
also works as fast moving tragi-farce. A summer festival production in
Athens twenty years ago had the audience on its feet and cheering at the
recognition scene.

The music for Oreste is almost all recycled, but this is less of a bad
thing. It's more like Rinaldo than like Alessandro Severo: Handel reuses
his own arias effectively in a coherent work. The overall result isn't that
different from perhaps Radamisto, or even Admeto. It could be pretty good
in an imaginative production, with some theatrical sense. The English Bach
Festival, though, is a byword for reverence.

Given that the singers basically sang and made the odd gesture, and the
orchestra delivered the music tidily, there's not really a lot to say about
the performance. Louise Winter's 1930s film-star looks were emphasised by a
platinum blond wig and made her into a very strange Oreste. She seemed
happier singing the music than she was as Edwige in the Glyndebourne
Rodelinda (where her appearance was superb). Lynda Russell as Hermione and
Jennifer Smith as Ifigenia are both sopranos of the old school and looked
and sounded almost indistinguishable in their baroque wigs and panniered
dresses. Victoria Simmonds was a bit underpowered as Filotete, but sounded
stylish and sweet when she was audible. Joseph Cornwall was a solid Pilade,
and John Rath as Toante was at least deliberately camply villainous.

The dancing, proudly discussed in the programme. obviously thoroughly
prepared and accurately executed, was unspeakable.