★★★★☆
Wouldn’t the ancient Greeks have led happier lives if they had simply ignored what the Oracles said? All that bad stuff might never have happened. The thought sidled into my head during one of the woollier parts of George Enescu’s Oedipe, performed in concert as the opening splash of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s new season.
Not that the wool lingered for long. As last year’s staging at the Royal Opera House showed, the Romanian virtuoso’s only opera, nurtured over nearly 30 years before its 1936 premiere in Paris, builds over four acts into an epic of glowering power. The LPO’s presentation, with soloists manacled to their scores, didn’t offer anything like Covent Garden’s Sphinx, reimagined in last year’s production as a wartime fighter