Handel reaches for the stars

Arianna in Creta at London Handel Festival

Megastar-in-the-making: Beth Taylor (Teseo in Arianna in Creta) Picture © FischerArtists.com

Fine singing has been a notable thread linking the main Handel performances I have attended this year in London, the latest of which was a thrillingly sung Arianna in Creta (April 20) the grand finale of the London Handel Festival at St George’s Hanover Square. David Bates, his young cast and La Nuova Musica really set the rafters ablaze.

This opera of 1734 is both a rarity and a ‘problem’ for Handelians. Composed between two of the composer’s greatest masterpieces, Orlando (1733) and Ariodante (1735), Arianna tends to get a bad press from scholars: in his essential two-volume survey of the operas, the late Winton Dean wrote of its “wretched” libretto, and gave Handel’s musical characterisations short shrift, especially in comparison to its successors Ariodante and Alcina. But the early 1730s were a tricky time for Handel, the opera impresario. After a row with Senesino over his Mad Scene in Orlando, his star castrato defected to a rival company, the so-called ‘Opera of the Nobility’, taking with him Antonio Montagnana, possibly the finest bass London had heard. Francesca Cuzzoni, the first Cleopatra and Rodelinda, also signed up, having left Handel’s company after an infamous (if sometimes questioned) bust-up with her “Rival Queen” Faustina Bordoni in 1727.