Premiered at Covent Garden in 1737, but not performed there again until now, Giustino is the latest of Handel’s “London” operas to earn a modern Royal Opera revival. It tells the story of a sixth-century peasant-born soldier who brings order to the Byzantine empire of which he is eventually crowned ruler.
The piece offers narrative challenges for the director, some of which Joe Hill-Gibbins and his colleagues overcome with sensitive simplicity, scaling down the scene changes in favour of a largely bare, ochre-painted stage, across which lamps oscillate gently and mesmerisingly. Other moments, including Giustino’s encounters with a bear and a sea monster, feel more arbitrary and just a bit daft. For all that it contains fine scenes, you can see why Handel did not revive it.
Always vocally intereresting… Mireille Asselin with Jonathan Lemalu Photograph: Marc Brenner
The playing of the La Nuova Musica ensemble in the pit is scintillating, however, and the interest level remains very high, thanks in part to Handel’s requirement for a virtuoso oboist (here the Academy of Ancient Music’s Leo Duarte). Horns and trumpets play on stage, to great musical and theatrical effect. The continuo is superbly varied in tone and timbre, even generating a Rheingold-like sonority at the start of act two. The Guildhall School of Music students shine in choral passages. David Bates’s conducting grips the piece from the start.
The problem is that it takes a long time for Giustino himself to emerge as the protagonist of the opera bearing his name. For much of the first half (the first two acts are here played without a break), Giustino is one of several principals all vying for a share of the action and control of events, and whose motives are not always clearly demarcated or terribly compelling. By act three, though, Polly Leech’s Giustino takes centre stage more decisively, with impressively burgeoning mezzo vocal range, and with violence at the opera’s end.
Until then, most of the fast-moving action revolves around the unhappy empress Arianna, her suitors and her enemies. With four female voices and a counter-tenor among the seven principals, and with Jonathan Lemalu’s Polidarte given little to do, the opera’s overall vocal colouring is at times too constrained. Benjamin Hulett’s Vitaliano provides some welcome tenor relief, incisively sung. Like her fellow principals, Mireille Asselin’s impressively acted and always vocally interesting Arianna grew more subtle and authoritative as the evening went on, as well as doubling up as a glittering Goddess of Fortune. Keri Fuge was an accomplished Anastasio, Esme Bronwen-Smith a sensitive Leocasta, and Jake Arditti stood out as a formidably sung Amanzio, the villain of a stimulating but uneven piece.
At the Linbury theatre, London, until 18 October
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