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Joyce DiDonato ‘sizzles and burns’ as Agrippina, with Franco Fagioli as Nerone.
Joyce DiDonato ‘sizzles and burns’ as Agrippina, with Franco Fagioli as Nerone. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Joyce DiDonato ‘sizzles and burns’ as Agrippina, with Franco Fagioli as Nerone. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The week in classical: Agrippina; The Intelligence Park; The Greek Passion – review

This article is more than 4 years old

Royal Opera House; Linbury theatre, London; Leeds Grand
Joyce DiDonato’s stop-at-nothing empress leads a top ensemble cast in Barrie Kosky’s enthralling Agrippina. Plus dizzying Gerald Barry and a powerful Martinů rarity

Current politics has nothing on the plots of Handel’s operas, in which love and power are continually enmeshed and recombined. He composed Agrippina (1709), an early masterpiece, for the Venice carnival in his mid-20s. Its humanity is as generous and wise, its music as dazzling and free-flowing, its emotional angles as sharp, as anything he wrote. The Royal Opera’s fast-moving new production by Barrie Kosky, premiered in Munich’s Bavarian State Opera in July, emphasises the work’s modernity and pertinence. It succeeds brilliantly, in most respects, but above all in its octet of singers, and in the ferocious, exciting playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (leader Margaret Faultless) under the baton of the Russian conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, in his ROH debut.

The star American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato sizzles and burns in the title role, on peak vocal and dramatic form with a witty array of inspired gestures, but this is an ensemble work, and she is impressively matched. The first night had hiccups, the galloping speeds from the pit causing a few hazards, but zest and intensity, together with Handel’s genius, won out. The opera is a study in deceit, with the only honest figure – Ottone, played with noble despair by the British countertenor Iestyn Davies – suffering the deepest anguish. His plea for help (“Otton, Otton, qual portentoso fulmine”), rising out of sour, dark dissonances in the orchestra, came as a sober indictment of the amorality of those around him. It was the evening’s devastating still point. The Argentinian countertenor Franco Fagioli as Agrippina’s simpering, vocally piercing and ear-pierced dolt of a son, Nerone, and the Italian bass Gianluca Buratto as her feeble, sex-pest husband, the Roman emperor Claudio, were deadly reminders that high office rarely falls to the most deserving.

In the cool, straight lines of Rebecca Ringst’s box-within-box designs, with lighting by Joachim Klein, it’s as if the mess and anarchy of life are being willed into rebarbative order. Extravagant costumes by Klaus Bruns added texture and flamboyance. It looked elegant, but the frequent and noisy manoeuvres of the set distracted at key moments, especially during the final love duet between Ottone and Poppea (the endlessly savvy and astute Lucy Crowe). Kosky’s taste for farce ran, or overran, the full gamut in Act 3, his performers rising gamely to his demands, scrambling up and down stairs while negotiating cascades of notes or shimmying (in the case of Davies) along the tops of furniture. Agrippina, suddenly a pop queen, competes and wins – with show-stopping comedy – against a jewel-encrusted live mic. Kosky’s restless imagination has its tropes, but the rewards far outweigh the excesses. Emelyanychev’s conducting, and some terrific solo playing from OAE players, made this an enthralling first new production of the season.

Snapping at Agrippina’s heels, occupying an 18th-century world chiming scabrously with Handel’s own, Gerald Barry’s The Intelligence Park opened downstairs at the ROH Linbury theatre in the work’s first staging since its 1990 premiere. A co-production with Music Theatre Wales and the London Sinfonietta, directed and designed by Nigel Lowery and conducted with fearless precision by Jessica Cottis, this production honoured the Irish composer’s extreme nonconformity. The world is a human zoo, contained within a toy theatre. A conflict of head and heart, infatuation and a creative block provide the surreal, salty, baroque plot (libretto by Vincent Deane), which has an opera-within-an-opera and includes characters named Wattle and Daub, as well as a row of bewigged rag dolls representing Dublin society.

‘Phenomenal’: Adrian Dwyer, Stephanie Marshall, Stephen Richardson, Patrick Terry, Rhian Lois and Michel de Souza in The Intelligence Park. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The text is impossibly dense, delivered in a declamatory, near-clockwork style, sounding uniformly metric yet changing tempo almost every bar. Hidden deep inside Barry’s musical language are nicks of melody, exploded chorales, funeral hymns and tolling bells. The impact is an aural blast, like reading Finnegans Wake as a flick book. It may not have the repertoire appeal of Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest but I was glad, if only once, to encounter it. The London Sinfonietta’s virtuosity, and the cast’s miraculous achievements – led by Michel de Souza with Adrian Dwyer, Stephen Richardson, Rhian Lois, Stephanie Marshall, Patrick Terry and (recorded solo treble) Rafael Flutter – were, without exaggeration, phenomenal.

Opera North is the first opera company in the UK to have been awarded the status of Theatre of Sanctuary, its involvement with those seeking refuge in the Leeds locality going far beyond any normal outreach programme. Staging Martinů’s rarely seen last opera, The Greek Passion (1957), whose subject is social displacement, therefore meant more than merely striving to put on a good show. Christopher Alden’s production, conducted by Garry Walker, the company’s music director designate, is certainly that: musically outstanding, striking in its depiction of Greek village life where simultaneous events – the staging of a passion play and the arrival of refugees – unsettle the community. Little wonder the performance of this lyrical, attractive but uneven piece (in an edition reconstructed by Aleš Brézina) had particular veracity.

Charles Edwards’s designs, a bank of retractable seating with white effigies to depict the faceless refugees, provided effective, simple imagery. Chorus and soloists – including Stephen Gadd, Paul Nilon, Magdalena Molendowska and, especially, John Savournin – excelled. The opera builds towards the shepherd Manolios’s soliloquy on charity. Chosen to play Christ, quiet at first, he struggles to match human instinct to this divine task until it bursts out of him, to tragic end. The tenor Nicky Spence, singing with open-hearted eloquence, made us think anew about the meaning of compassion.

Nicky Spence (Manolios) in Opera North’s The Greek Passion. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Star ratings (out of five)
Agrippina
★★★★
The Intelligence Park
★★★★
The Greek Passion
★★★★

  • Agrippina is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 11 October

  • The Intelligence Park is at the Linbury theatre, Royal Opera House, London, until 4 October

  • The Greek Passion is at Leeds Grand theatre until 19 October, then touring until 16 November

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