In a land where any performance of a Handel opera is an extremely rare event, it was an unexpected pleasure to be able to attend the New Zealand première of Handel's Oreste, a collaboration between Auckland Opera Studio and NZ Barok, Auckland's local baroque-instrument orchestra. Oreste is often referred to as a pasticcio, an opera that apart from the recitatives and some of the orchestral interludes was entirely assembled from already extant music. The difference in this case is that it was compiled by the composer himself from his own existing operas as part of his 1734 Covent Garden season. The opening night featured basically the same line-up of luminaries as Handel's later Alcina (including Carestini and Anna Maria Strada del Pò) and while Auckland Opera Studio possibly couldn't match that star power, this performance of Oreste showcased a exceptionally strong young cast keenly in tune with Handelian style.
The period of the music's composition ranges from 1709 (one aria from Agrippina) to 1732 (several from Sosarme) with many arias being recycled from lesser-known Handel operas such as Siroe and Ottone. Given the decades across which Handel penned the original music it is remarkable at how coherent in style Oreste is, never sounding like a hodgepodge like many pasticcios can. The plot, adapted from Euripides, is basically familiar to those who know Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, though with the addition of Oreste's wife Ermione and the guard Filotete who is in love with Ifigenia. While the characterisation is significantly more two-dimensional and the dramatic arc less convincing than Gluck's masterpiece, Handel's music is a consistent delight, each aria giving a credible emotional flavour to its new position. Billed as a semi-staged production, Auckland Opera Studio's stage design featured a few simple props and some apt images and designs projected onto the rear wall of the stage. Benjamin Henson's direction was effective, giving dramatic impetus despite the rather stilted plot. A few arias were cut from the third act, tightening the drama considerably, and while the arias were given in Italian, the bridging recitatives were in English.
The lead role, written for the famed castrato Carestini, was taken here by Stephen Diaz. His is a large voice for a countertenor, rounded in tone and with a general heroic ring out into the theatre. This role features one ridiculously difficult coloratura aria after another and, like all the cast, he showed great imagination in the decorations in the reprises of the da capo arias, launching into a miraculous flurry of scales in the virtuosic "Agitato da fiere tempeste". Occasional insecurity of breath affected the legato of some of his later arias but he acquitted himself more than honourably in his even more fiendish closing number. Opposite him were two well-contrasted soprano leads in the roles of Ermione and Ifigenia. Rebecca Ryan as the former had the more vocally acrobatic of the two roles and she conquered the fioritura with consummate skill, achieving lovely delicacy in the ubiquitous bird-metaphor aria and raging with equal skill in her angry outbursts at the tyrannical king Toante. Following on from her success as Papagena in NZ Opera's The Magic Flute, Madison Nonoa brought effortless lyricism to the languid arias of the priestess Ifigenia. The higher register has a particularly glowing radiance, a feature she took repeated advantage of in her da capo variations, floating jewel-like high notes into the hall. It was a pity that the lovely "Mi lagnero tacendo" (originally from Siroe) was cut as she would no doubt have delivered it stunningly.