★★★★★
Handel understood women. He particularly understood women who make fools of themselves, who fall into traps of their own devising, who don’t get their man, who have to put on a happy face, make amends and be grateful for second best when the curtain falls. In Ariodante, that woman is poor, silly Dalinda, crazy in love with Polinesso, who, inevitably, is in love with someone else and is bad to the bone.
Primed and polished over a sequence of concert performances in New York, Vienna and Hamburg, Harry Bicket and the English Concert’s Ariodante was fuelled by female energy. This was Handel as an Almodóvar ensemble piece: comic and tragic in equal measure; at ease with extreme beauty and extreme ugliness of sound,