Performer: Christian Curnyn

Christopher Alden’s Olivier Award-winning production of Handel’s Partenope returns to the Coliseum, but it's the singing that earns the plaudits. 

Superb Handelian singing and intense character acting light up Handel’s Semele, staged as a stark, uncompromising indictment of the rich and powerful. 

A concert performance of a Purcell semi-opera can never fully succeed, but compromise is worth it, if it enables us to hear a significant part of a major composer's output.