Handel’s Partenope returns to the Coliseum, 17 years on from its Olivier Award-winning debut in Christopher Alden’s English National Opera production... and I still don’t get it. The humour is cheaply earned, the modish aesthetic owes more to Cocteau-esque camp than to the drama of conflict and there are long periods of directorial filler during which action is inconsequential and sterile. Alden’s penchant for toilet humour and Amanda Holden's sweary English translation win giggles from an easily amused section of the audience. Clearly, since Handel’s opera is comic in origin, the gloves of good taste are off.
With six singers and no chorus, Partenope is practically a drawing-room drama. Our heroine is courted variously by Armindo (Prince of Rhodes), Emilio (whom she has defeated in battle) and Arsace (who is being stalked by Rosmira). As a tale, it's ripe for an imaginative staging but, pace the Olivier judges, this isn’t it. Alden apes the French Surrealists and creates a smart 1920s mood within a trio of white sets, designed by Andrew Lieberman, whose blandness is utilitarian and transferable. A lavatory, front and centre in Act 2, is the only practical location we see; everything else is eye candy.
A devil’s advocate would argue that the opera’s inherent silliness suits the surreal and gave Alden a ruse for staging tricky da capo arias without too much tedium, as when the versatile American countertenor Jake Ingbar – who can tap-dance a buck and wing and flip cartwheels every bit as well as he can sing – delivered “Voglio dire al mio tesoro” while prat-falling beneath a grand staircase. However, when nothing we see is grounded in reality, arias that express true emotion (of which there are several) seem merely synthetic.
Christian Curnyn, who led ENO's production in both 2008 and 2017, was taken ill after Act 1 and for the rest of the evening gave way to his accomplished assistant conductor, William Cole. Between them they drew playing of energised refinement from the ever-adaptable ENO Orchestra and coaxed some deliciously idiomatic playing from their predominantly modern instruments.
The characters, although ill-assorted within the drama, were superbly matched in a clutch of five-star performances that bore no hint of a weak link. It was a privilege to hear such a flawless ensemble on an opera stage: every singer was inspired and the collective sound was sheer Handelian magic. In the title role, Nardus Williams was as slinkily gorgeous on the ear as her fabulous costumes, by Jon Morrell, were on the eye. The soprano held the stage with the languid confidence of a diva who doesn’t have to try too hard to cast her spell and bewitch.
Tenor Ru Charlesworth, the only survivor from the 2017 revival, sang powerfully in a ludicrously conceived incarnation of Emilio as a nuisance with a camera whose presence is rarely welcomed by his peers, while William Thomas added his burnished bass to the general campery as Ormonte, Partenope's bearded manservant with a penchant for drag. Cross-dressing of a more plot-essential kind was the province of mezzo-soprano Katie Bray who, as Rosmira, wore a male disguise (Eurimene) while she jealously tracked Arsace as he betrayed her by pursuing Partenope. Bray’s dramatic chops are electrifying: she moved between stillness and hysteria with ease and inflected every note with meaning and, where appropriate, subtext.
The opera’s countertenors, meanwhile, fought their own battle. The result was a draw since the aforementioned Ingbar and rising star Hugh Cutting were both, for want of a better cliché, dazzling. Cutting effaced memories of the production’s previous use of female singers as Arsace with a performance of intensity, musicality and vocal clarity that will live long in the memory.
