On occasion an opera production stamps an imprint on a work so wholeheartedly that it becomes the audience’s touchstone for a generation. Jonathan Miller’s 1982 mafioso Rigoletto – New York gangsters and a juke-box-playing duke – wins out for ingenuity and box office success. (Dog-eared or not, it will return to the English National Opera in the autumn.) Glyndebourne’s 2005 staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare (1724), directed by David McVicar, is another once seen, never forgotten hit. Last revived in 2018, Giulio Cesare is back and flying – revived by McVicar himself – with a first-class cast, the Handelian Laurence Cummings conducting a work he knows inside out, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment excelling in the pit. Handel’s score, among his best loved, overflows with star arias in every humour, from jubilant to sorrowful.
At the start, model clippers bobbing on sparkling, mechanical waves arouse complex impressions: toy theatre, island nation, seafaring power; imperial ambition, violence, war. Handel’s setting is the Roman-Egyptian war of 48-47BC. The victorious Caesar sails into Alexandria, only to encounter the tricky duo of Ptomely and Cleopatra, co-regent siblings and rivals. McVicar, with his design team led by Robert Jones, has updated the action, handsomely and eclectically, to Britain’s invasion of Egypt in 1882: red-coat soldiers, pith helmets and a prevalent Victorian attitude towards the declining Ottoman empire as a place of feminine “oriental” fantasy. Cleopatra and her entourage are dressed in sumptuous colours and bejewelled costumes (designed by Brigitte Reiffenstuel). Well-drilled physical detail and dance, with a nod to Bollywood, are key to the action (choreography by Andrew George). This is a long evening but with fun to be had, especially when the on-stage violinist Kati Debretzeni has a virtuosic standoff with Caesar, beating his vocal fireworks with dazzling trills and a big, fat pizzicato.
