Oreste, Wilton’s Music Hall, review: A Handel-Mad Max mash-up
Gerard Jones directs this blackly comic production of Handel’s masterful pasticcio starring the Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists.
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Your support makes all the difference.‘Opera is Game of Thrones from 200 years ago’ declares the 32-year-old Gerard Jones, directing Oreste, with others in the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, the Royal Opera House’s nursery for new talent. (David Junghoon Kim’s progress this season attests its success.)
Oreste, taken from Euripides, was the first of the three pasticcio operas (sort of paste-ups) which Handel himself created from his own works. It outlines Oreste’s reunion with his sister Iphigenia (remarkably secure soprano Jennifer Davis) while she is serving as high priestess of Diana in Tauris operating the harsh laws of King Toante (bass Simon Shibambu in crazed dictator mode), which require all strangers to be sacrificed.
For Jones, the horrific cruelty of the classics translates easily into a grungy post-apocalyptic world where order has entirely broken down: a tagged urban underbelly where all protagonists wonder in a traumatised daze of psychopathic bloodlust. Acting is strong – we shall surely see more of baritone Gyula Nagy, and soprano Vlada Borovko, who lands in this world like something out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and sings with style to match.
The eight-strong Southbank Sinfonia under James Hendry impressed, with reliable tempos and much lyricism, and the lower strings relishing every scrunch on offer.
But for all the ingenious attention to gruesome detail, it’s not entirely clear what this Handel-Mad Max mash-up really adds to our understanding of either.
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