An ensemble achievement that dances and sparkles: Glyndebourne’s Giulio Cesare reviewed

A classic opera production ages like wine. When David McVicar’s staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare first opened at Glyndebourne in 2005, Michael Tanner – writing in these pages – loathed it. ‘A quite hateful betrayal’ was how he described a production that is now widely regarded as a classic. It would be easy to brandish those words now he’s gone – ha ha, no one ever erected a statue to a critic – ignoring the truth that any first night review can only ever be a snapshot, and that the big story back then was the hyperactive, neon-lit debut of Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra. Tanner did predict that de Niese would do well out of it, though no one guessed that she’d end up marrying the owner of the theatre.

Still, I’d love to have heard his thoughts two decades later in the life of this production, now the rough patches have bedded in, raw emotions have deepened and ripened, and Cleopatra is played by an artist with the vocal beauty and dramatic range of the British soprano Louise Alder.

Playful and girlish in her early scenes with the psychotic Tolomeo (Cameron Shahbazi – a deliciously toxic portrayal), by the start of act three Alder was singing with a concentrated, tragic eloquence that held the whole theatre in breathless silence. In between she was regal, flirtatious, and thrillingly sensual by turns; all conveyed in singing whose sweetness and expressive power admitted just the right amounts of brilliance and shade. Custom really could not stale her infinite variety.

Whether Alder’s performance was what brought the whole show into focus, it’s hard to say – again, good productions reveal new complexities with time – but it certainly provided a centre for an ensemble achievement that danced and sparkled (the choreography with which McVicar beguiles Handel’s lengthier flights is one of his happiest inspirations) without excluding darker emotions.

Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen was an unusually affable and mellow Cesare while Beth Taylor (Cornelia) and Svetlina Stoyanova (a plangent Sesto) brought such pathos and nobility to the scenes in which they were brutalised by Tolomeo that the poignancy gradually seeped out into the rest of the drama, tinting the bright historical pageant of the early scenes with intensely human pity and pain.

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Laurence Cummings conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – lithe and buoyant when energy was called for but also probing determinedly into the score’s darker secrets.

As to McVicar’s staging: for those who haven’t seen it, a replica of a baroque theatre with a backdrop of a rolling sea is peopled by a scrapbook of images from across a very different period of imperial history. There are redcoats in pith helmets, coffee-drinking Ottoman pashas and Bollywood-inspired dance routines. Even the fall and sweep of the curtains is part of the drama, as the martial austerity of Roman power (cardboard dreadnoughts and Zeppelins) yields to the lush silks of Cleopatra’s boudoir.

True, it sounds like a regular mish-mash, and played as Carry on Cleo (as it seems to have been in 2005) you can see why it might have infuriated an opera-lover who regarded Giulio Cesare as a complex and rewarding study of human nature. It’s a much subtler affair this time around, and accordingly, McVicar’s visual kedgeree functions like an exquisitely-lit trompe l’oeil. Think Arcimboldo: a collage of mostly non-baroque elements is assembled in such a way that it somehow looks and feels supremely baroque. It’s all about alchemy, and all about perspective. I wish Michael could have seen it one more time.

Meanwhile at Covent Garden it would be unfair to say that Jan Philipp Gloger’s 2016 staging of Cosi fan tutte has aged like milk. But on the strength of this tasting, the long-term prognosis is not great. We’re in a sort of film studio where the director Don Alfonso (Gerald Finley, inexplicably dressed as a 17th-century puritan) shunts his lovestruck experimental subjects through a series of visually inventive set pieces – a railway station, a Dinky toy theatre, a Garden of Eden complete with cheerful-looking snake – en route to a conclusion that leaves the four lovers thoroughly miserable while Mozart’s music sings of forgiveness and resolution.

In other words, there’s plenty to look at while Gloger fails to make sense of the thing, and the audience did seem to enjoy the ride. Alexander Soddy conducted with red-blooded bravura, and the singing was very fine, too: Finley on ripe, wry form; Jennifer France enjoyably spiky as Despina and Golda Schultz bringing nuance and a real emotional punch as a deeply vulnerable Fiordiligi. It’s probably futile to hope for more. In a century as priggish as ours, an Enlightenment-era comedy about the dangers of projecting unattainable ideals on to actual flawed human beings is never likely to land in one piece. But then, we’ve got five years to learn all about that.