Eduige Sarah Connolly Rodelinda Lisa Milne Garibaldo Jonathan Best Bertarido David Cordier Grimoaldo Paul Nilon Unulfo Lawrence Zazzo Conductor Harry Bicket Director Jean-Marie Villegier Revival director Christopher Cowell The Glyndebourne Touring production of Rodelinda is the silent-movie one from this year's festival, with a different cast and a few minor changes. I saw only the broadcast of the festival version, so I can't compare the two directly. But the main idea, that the characters types and situations of the opera make sense as Stroheim costume drama, seems to work even better this time round. And this cast in general suits the music far better than the festival cast. In particular, Sarah Connolly and Lisa Milne are both old Handel hands and carried off their roles in style where Anna Caterina Antonacci just didn't work vocally as Rodelinda, and Louise Winter didn't work at all as Eduige. Connolly, tough looking in a platinum blonde wig, made sense as the hard-bitten bad girl who comes through in the end, maybe even Jean Harlow, and sang Eduige's music forcefully. Milne is comfortably upholstered (Connolly and she together looked like Tenniel's Red and White Queens, with reversed hair colours), but was vocally glamorous in the appropriate musical style. Paul Nilon as Grimoaldo sang beautifully, emphasising his misery rather than his cruelty. Nilon was as mean a Nero as you could want in the WNO Poppea, but this production went with a wet Grimoaldo who was never really going to kill the young Flavio. In a way his Grimoaldo was a mirror of Rodelinda, an emotional person forced into extreme behaviour by circumstances. Rodelinda was pointing a gun at him at one moment, but clearly wasn't mean enough to shoot. If you usurp a kingdom it's your own fault, of course, though I think it's implicit in this production that Garibaldo is responsible for all of the nastiness in Grimoaldo's regime. Jonathan Best's Garibaldo was a curl of the lip short of a complete impersonation of Conrad Veidt. This paid off in the relationship between Garibaldo and Eduige, something like that between Veidt and Joan Crawford in A woman's face. Best's singing was thuggish rather than insinuating, appropriately for his music. His aria on how to be a really nasty tyrant was particularly effective. Lawrence Zazzo has a fraction of the voice of Artur Stefanowicz, but his singing is in much better shape, and he handled the comic aspects of Unolfo with a light touch. He's got a pleasant stage presence, and the audience applauded all three of his not very interesting arias. David Cordier was an interesting surprise. I hadn't heard him live for almost twenty years, and remember him has having a pleasant little voice. But his singing tonight was substantial, with a middle weight voice that was slightly unfocussed at times but often very beautiful and expressive (notably in the duet with Rodelinda at the end of act 2 where they describe the torture of meeting again only for him to face death). Cordier doesn't have the ease or presence of Andreas Scholl, but he made a reasonably effective, if slightly nervous, Byronic hero manque. John Gilbert, maybe. The production seems to have come together this time round. The singers were all at ease with the mannered acting style, and somehow fit the types much better. (Though Paul Nilon just doesn't have the cheekbones that Kurt Streit has.) I think some arias were cut to A sections only, which helped reduce some of the business required. The shtick with the armed tea trolley was still there -- Connolly managed to extract weapons from under the cloth as a background activity to her aria. But Garibaldo didn't come back from the dead to serve drinks at the end. Harry Bicket and the Glyndebourne Touring Orchestra played briskly but idiomatically. The performance was somehow missing a sense of drama and forward drive, but I think that's the nature of Handel opera at times -- the scenes stand alone as expressions of an emotion or problem, and there's no great build-up to an explosive conclusion. The monochrome set might also have contributed to the understated atmosphere, as did the watery "sunlight" at the end. But everything held together and made narrative and musical sense. No wonder Flavio turned out screwy.