United Kingdom Garsington Opera 2025 [3] – Handel, Rodelinda: Soloists, The English Concert / Peter Whelan (conductor). Garsington Opera at Wormsley, 19.6.2025. (CR)
Production:
Director – Ruth Knight
Designer – Leslie Traver
Lighting – Ben Pickersgill
Movement director – Rebecca Meltzer
Cast:
Rodelinda – Lucy Crowe
Bertarido – Tim Mead
Grimoaldo – Ed Lyon
Eduige – Marvic Monreal
Unulfo – Hugh Cutting
Garibaldo – Brandon Cedel
Flavio – Nicholas Thurbin
Gundeberto – Will Hodson
In Ruth Knight’s production for Garsington of one of Handel’s operatic masterpieces, Rodelinda (1725), Baroque elegance is turned into an effective and often tense, lurid hybrid of a Gothic horror story with Jacobean revenge tragedy. More of the back history (a play by Corneille the immediate source) than is usually replayed in performance or detailed in synopses is mimed on the stage during the Overture, recounting a problematic, King Lear-inspired division of the kingdom of Lombardy in the late-seventh century. The partition among the three children of Ariberto is exploited by the unscrupulous Grimoaldo, who has arranged for the killing of Gundeberto (whose blood remains on stage as an accusing stain – reminiscent of Lady Macbeth’s ‘out, damned spot’?), driven Bertarido away from Milan, and seeks to consolidate his monopoly of power by marrying Eduige. That division is mapped out with the three raised boxes for the supposed, actual or planned graves of those three. Despite their association with death, they also seem to represent a realm elevated from Grimoaldo’s tyrannical schemes below, a vantage point from which hope and just restoration may yet emerge; where Bertarido’s courageous and resourceful wife Rodelinda, or Bertarido and his confidant Unulfo occasionally take refuge before they are reunited, like Lear and Cordelia in their prison, ’like birds i’ the cage…..And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies’.
Among the horrors witnessed in Grimoaldo’s murky regime is the preparation for the banquet to follow his planned wedding with Rodelinda (having turned his attentions to her after Bertarido devises a long-term scheme to reclaim the throne, and has his own death announced). On the table are the dismembered parts of a butchered pig, perhaps bringing to mind the horrible cannibalistic feast of Titus Andronicus – although Rodelinda and Bertarido’s son, Flavio, is not yet sacrificed and served up, Rodelinda challenges Grimoaldo to kill him, knowing that he is too cowardly to do so, for all his evil bravado. The ritual doesn’t get as far as David Cameron’s alleged student shenanigans with a pig’s head, though Ediuge’s Salome-style actions with one comes close.
Grimoaldo’s adviser, Garibaldo, manipulates much of the action throughout the drama, however, as the éminence grise – or rather noire here, with his silent cohort of black-dressed furies or fates who haunt much of the action or menacingly embody his threats, as in the stomping accompaniment they make to his Iago-like confession of his wicked programme for rule in the pounding ‘Tirannia gli diede il regno’. But, also functioning like a silent chorus (in the absence of any musical ones, as normal for opera seria) they undertake some evocatively ritualistic actions in golden tragic masks, and are also tamed by the mellifluous countertenor singing of Bertarido and Unulfo, like Orpheus’s entrancing the beasts and the underworld.
Overall, it is a very different vision of the opera from the cooler, more detached study in the exercise of fascist power memorably explored in Jean-Marie Villégier’s production for Glyndebourne as though a 1920s silent movie. (Incidentally, exactly also the moment precisely a century ago – on the eve of the fascist takeover of power around Europe – when a Göttingen production of this opera marked the start of the Handelian opera revival in the modern period, after none of the composer’s operas had been seen since his own lifetime. It’s dispiriting to find, in 2025, the political world stage again harassed by Grimoaldo’s would-be autocratic, murderous successors.) The blending of elements from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and a certain Baroque flamboyance in costumes and choreography, is a generally compelling mixture of theatrical traditions, not played for laughs like an operatic Rock Horror Show, and far more consistent than the distracting mishmash of Richard Jones’s English National Opera production eleven years ago, even if the routines for some of the numbers are meretricious and play to the gallery. Act III becomes somewhat static, and so the triumphant climax registers less resoundingly or cathartic than it should. It is also a pity that the second, long interval comes not immediately after the sublime prison duet, ‘Io t’abbraccio’, that ends Act II, but a few numbers before that, breaking up the natural structural contours of Handel’s score.
Nevertheless, the performance is undergirded by an urgent, propulsive interpretation of the music from Peter Whelan and the English Concert. Even the slower numbers, although not hard pressed, have a forward drive which abets the impression of a lurching momentum across each act, along with often robust continuo parts. It is quite far removed from the more stately approach of ensembles such as Alan Curtis’s Il Complesso Barocco or Michael Schneider’s La Stagione in recordings of this music, or even the English Concert’s own recent version with Harry Bicket (and two of the same singers as here), and it won’t necessarily be to all tastes. But it is undoubtedly in stylistic harmony with the production, even as Whelan also draws some intriguingly woodier timbres more readily associated with Rameau or other French Baroque repertoire to heighten the drama.
Lucy Crowe develops an impressively versatile account of the title role. Her vocalism – by turns affecting, animated, or wild in her coloratura and upper register – makes Rodelinda no mere pawn or victim in this vicious game of thrones, but rightly embodies her agency as the heroine of this opera whose plans ultimately outwit everybody else’s, and secures her restoration. Tim Mead exudes a bright, crisp tone as Bertarido (a role created by Handel for the superstar castrato Senesino) ensuring stable and moving performances of ‘Dove sei’ and ‘Vivi tiranno’, but he is slightly offkey in the gently lilting pastoral aria ‘Con rauco mormorio’. Hugh Cutting complements him well as Unulfo, with his warmer, more yearning countertenor, his well sustained lines as dependable as his loyalty to the deposed king.
Ed Lyon artfully displays Grimoaldo’s ultimately ineffectual wiliness, judged with an agile but not heroically effusive singing, and an impulsive but not quite commanding characterisation, in a role cast for the tenor voice (unusually in a Baroque opera). Bass-baritone Brandon Cedel crackles darkly and persuasively as the malign influencer, Garibaldo, slithering through the notes with the same seamless force as he impels his black spirits. Marvic Monreal cultivates a creamily inscrutable vocal profile which paradoxically deepens the character of Eduige, who can otherwise seem little more than a cipher to others.
Curtis Rogers