Subject: Alcina, Handel Opera Group, Cambridge

Alcina      Ann Mackay
Morgana     Kay Jordan
Ruggiero    Catherine Griffiths
Bradamante  Christine Botes
Oronte      Michael Bennett
Melisso     Rodney Gibson
Oberto      Helen Swift

Director    Richard Gregson
Conductor   Andrew Jones
Translated and edited by
            Andrew Jones

I saw this on Saturday 3May97 with some friends who wanted to do something
to help them recover from the election. They enjoyed it a lot, and I enjoyed
it enough to see it again the next night and try to work out what was going
on. (I'd only heard the famous bits -- Me lusigna, Verdi prati, the act 2
ballet, and the one about the tiger -- before.)

The Handel Opera Group is one of several groups in Cambridge that puts on
productions in the Music School in West Road, normally with young
professional singers in the main roles and orchestra and crew from the
academic musical community. The Music School auditorium is a bit basic
in theatrical facilities, but it has a good acoustic and a stage that's
easy to fill.

The performances were excellent. Kay Jordan as Morgana was a perfect
Handelian bimbo, and Catherine Griffiths and Christine Botes were exactly
right as Ruggiero and Bradamante. Ruggiero developed from drippy to
bumptiously heroic very effectively, and Bradamante was well tough with
moments of uncertainty. (Botes has a touch of Janet Baker about her.)
I still can't see what she could see in him, though.

I think everyone's favourite, though, was Helen Swift as Oberto. She
managed to look like an unnaturally innocent and pleasant young teenage
boy, and sang with a beautiful pure but full voice. Definitely someone
to watch.

The sets and costumes were sometimes reminiscent of skool pla. In particular,
the lion who was really Astolfo had a mane made of those plastic net things
you scrub dishes with, and there was a touch of the dressing-up basket
about most of the other principals. I think the idea was an
eighteenth-century view of the early renaissance, with the idea of
evoking (say) a salon posing as an ideal community. There was a fair bit
of watery green and many tricorn hats, especially on women in the chorus.
The animal heads (apart from the lion's mane) were well done, though.
The backdrop was a rather messy painting of (presumably) a seascape,
and the illusory delights of the isle were three buildings or large
wardrobes that slid on and off stage. All a bit tatty, though obviously
the possibilities were limited in the first place.

The direction and acting, while they didn't make everything transparent,
brought out the entertainment value and provided some moving moments.
But the whole thing is based on a sequence of deception and irony, and a
lot of the latter was lost. Everyone except Alcina and Morgana wore tied
blue scarves, which came off when they were freed from illusion. But
Bradamante did some business with the ring and kept hers on, and Oberto
clearly recognized his father before losing his -- the device didn't quite
come off, as well as being not quite obvious in the first place. And there
should have been at least a programme note explaining that Alcina's final
warning that Ruggiero will die isn't a lie -- this is the one real dark
moment in the whole thing, but this production made the (rather Mozartian)
trio look like Alcina just trying one feeble trick too many.  This is a
problem with the libretto, of course -- there are too many twists and turns
for any sustained realistic character development, though the plot is
something like a school for lovers and seems to need it for a modern audience.

Fortunately, the singing was so good throughout that I didn't worry too much
at the time about why they were singing that at this particular
moment. Verdi prati still seems completely unmotivated, though Griffiths
sang it very movingly.

Andrew Jones conducted a very impressive orchestra, and they even managed
to make the ballets interesting (with some help from some extremely
proficient dancers in acts 1 and 3). I had some small reservations about
Jones' translation, though. Oberto had to sing "Major torments fill my
breast" -- I know he's a teenager, but that's a bit too public school.
What's wrong with "dreadful"? Ruggiero had to sing "lips that entice you"
at the start of a line, to music that made it come out as "nips...." every
time. And there were several cases of two English words set to one musical
word (is this a real concept? I mean that there's only one word stress in
the music) so that the meaningful word got lost.

I seem to have found a lot of niggles, but they're actually minor compared
to the musical achievement of this production. I hope this cast will
perform Alcina together again when many more people can get to hear them.