Ottone, English Touring Opera, review: 'a rare delight for Handel lovers'

Despite ranking during his lifetime as one of Handel’s most successful operas - a favourite vehicle for star sopranos and castrati - Ottone has enjoyed relatively few modern revivals and failed to recapture the public’s imagination to the extent that Alcina and Giulio Cesare have.

Yet in the light of English Touring Opera’s production, its virtues shine and one feels that it might just catch on. The plot moves forward purposefully, without endless pointless grandstanding for full-scale da capo numbers. Charged with punchy recitative, the libretto follows an organic narrative shape, tracing psychologically complex yet consistent characters caught in a web of jealousy and misunderstanding. And even if it lacks the episodes of sublime melancholy or dramatic intensity which mark the later operas, the score is rich in sinuous and beguiling Handelian melody - “Falsa immagine” and “Tanti affanni” being only two of its arias that became hits in Georgian England.

As in the case of Haydn’s Life on the Moon, its bedfellow on ETO’s autumn tour, the designs by takis (sic) contribute a great deal to one’s pleasure: here they economically suggest a world of gilded Byzantine splendour without mere flummery. As a result, the show doesn’t feel constrained by the corsetry of baroque artifice, and James Conway’s modest and sensible direction allows it to breathe and move freely.

Playing a scheming mother seeking advancement for her son, Gillian Webster stands out for crystalline soprano tone and meticulous articulation - why don’t we hear more of this accomplished singer, once a regular at Covent Garden? She is sharply contrasted to Louise Kemeny as the forlorn virginal Princess Teofane, whose plight is touchingly expressed in the haunting “Falsa immagine”, and Rosie Aldridge as the jilted fiancée who isn’t sure whether she loves or hates her betrayer.

As so often in baroque opera, the men seem pusillanimous in comparison - no reflection here on two accomplished counter tenors Clint van der Linde (as the warrior-emperor Ottone) and Andrew Radley (as his rival Adelberto) or that staunchly reliable bass-baritone Grant Doyle (as Teofane’s Corsair brother).

Jonathan Peter Kenny conducts ETO’s “period” orchestra with sparky energy, and even if the lighting could have been a bit brighter and the useful surtitles (giving plot summaries rather than line-by-line transcriptions of the English translation) presented more consistently, these are only small irritations in a performance that will give Handel lovers rare delight.

020 7833 2555; www.englishtouringopera.co.uk