Giove in Argo review – seductive rare revival of Handel’s recycled opera

Giove in Argo was in limbo until recently. One of Handel’s last operas, it was flung together in a matter of days in 1739 by recycling arias from earlier successes and mixing them with a handful of newly composed numbers. No complete manuscript survives, though the discovery, in 2001, of some of the missing material led to its eventual revival, in Germany, in 2007. James Bonas’s staging for the London Handel festival, in collaboration with the Royal College of Music, is the first in the UK since the 18th century.

Dramatically canny, the opera forges a new narrative featuring characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Giove (Jupiter) pursues the nymph Calisto through a forest sacred to Diana, whose votaress Calisto has become. She, however, is also being pursued by her dangerous wolfman father, Licaone, and he is being stalked in turn by Iside and Osiri – feuding Egyptian royals rather than deities – who want revenge for his murder of Iside’s father.

There are echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Bonas’s forest, an extraordinary construction of chrome and rubber, is a place of sinister magic, where crumbling inhibitions release violence as well as desire. It’s sexy, unsettling music theatre, though Bonas can’t disguise the fact that Handel never fully integrates Licaone into the drama, or that the denouement is too contrived to be convincing.

Conducted by Laurence Cummings, it sounds terrific. There are outstanding performances from Angela Simkin’s traumatised Iside, Peter Aisher’s seductive yet predatory Giove and Nicholas Morton’s Osiri, who morphs in a flash from bespectacled nerd to charismatic vigilante. Sofia Larsson’s Calisto gets to sing Tornami a Vagheggiar, imported from Alcina, which she does with considerable aplomb. Matthew Buswell makes much of too little as Licaone, while Rose Setten exudes hauteur as the totemic, very unnerving Diana.