If the director James Robert Carson was making a point about the self-satisfied myopia of monarchs it merely left us baffled.
It may not be top-drawer Handel but it holds the attention, more or less, from its stormy opening bars to its cheerfully regal conclusion – here given an unexplained and unwarranted twist when Costanza, at last united with Richard, collapses in the crowd unnoticed by her royal husband. As performed at the RCM it proved a musical treat with a string of variously ardent, poetic and rumbustious arias. Despite its inert drama and awful plot squeaks, its grimly comical nationalism as a nod to the new George II ("the British people are famous for toppling the arrogant" runs one line which raised a laugh), Riccardo Primo has its merits. The Plantagenet king is en route to the Third Crusade but gets stuck in Cyprus where he pretends to be his own ambassador in order to be united with his adored betrothed, Costanza, whom he has not yet met.
It may be as long again before it returns.
Its last proper UK performance was at Sadler's Wells in 1964. This 1727 rarity was the operatic highlight of the 35th London Handel festival in its annual collaboration with the Royal College of Music International Opera School. R ichard the Lionheart, soldier-king, tyrant and philanderer of uncertain sexuality, has had no shortage of fictional reincarnations but surely none more bizarre or psychologically awkward than Handel's Riccardo Primo, re d'Inghilterra.
0 kommentar(er)
