Ah, school days! Lines on the blackboard, impossible algebra, mysterious smells from the chemistry lab — and taking to the battlefield for war on the Saracens. No, the last item wasn’t on most school syllabuses, but in the first British staging of Rinaldo by a mainstream opera company in more than 30 years director, Robert Carsen gleefully brings Crusaders, Moors and enchantresses into the classroom, bike shed and dormitory.
It’s only a few weeks since Christopher Alden created a similar environment for Britten’s Dream at ENO. Carsen’s spectacle isn’t much about adolescent angst, however, but escapism. The sort of escapism that a teenage boy will have when his schoolmates are much stronger and nastier than he is. So one minute Sonia Prina’s pipsqueak Rinaldo is being viciously bullied, the next he is donning a breastplate and ordering his tormentors into war. It’s Jerusalem drawn by Jennings.
Flippant? Even the stoutest Handelians would admit that his 1711 opera was less a fully-realised drama than an advert for what its 26-year-old composer could offer: spectacle, shameless showmanship, and, yes, pure escapism. Gremlins on first night didn’t help Carsen sell his own special effects. One of the ingenious projections on the blackboard (sets by Gideon Davey) failed to magic itself correctly, and a power-cut half-way through Rinaldo’s devastating Cara Sposa was a cruel misfortune. Still, there are plenty of authorised explosions in a science lab run by the Christian Magician (a rather hooty William Towers) who finally points our heroes in the right direction for glory: the sports field.
If you didn’t go to boarding school, by this time you may wish simply to surrender to excellent singing and playing. Which is fine, for there is plenty. Ottavio Dantone conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightnment in a thrillingly zingy reading of the score. Prina may not be the world’s most convincing boy, but her alto-ish mezzo devours this virtuosic music. The baddies are good value: Luca Pisaroni’s snarling Argante is pure panto villain; as a dominatrix-like Armida, the PVC-clad Brenda Rae is every schoolboy’s favourite nightmare.
Back in the First Eleven, there’s fine support from Tim Mead’s Eustazio and Varduhi Abrahamyan’s Goffredo. Only Anett Fritsch’s Almirena, Rinaldo’s mousy intended, needs a dropful more honey in her tone. But seduction in a St Trinian’s smock was never an easy task.
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Box office: 01273 813813; to August 22.
Supported by Carol and Paul Collins