Bodies in space, tumbling, rolling, hurtling; at the same time singing, playing, dancing. Handel’s many solo cantatas, which parse the extremes of human anguish, are dramatic on their own terms. As staged by director Adele Thomas for the headline event of this year’s London Handel festival, they expose life’s agonies with new levels of pity and transparency. Anger, grief, revenge, enveloped in music of gleaming precision and beauty, chafe and discomfort us. In their intensity and physicality, the performances here – four cantatas, each with a different singer, together with a dancer and small instrumental ensemble – provoke stark sympathy.
Gathered under the title In the Realms of Sorrow, the cantatas are amplified further, almost discreetly, by tiny musical interludes newly composed by Héloïse Werner: an untuning or retuning, strange harmonics, a hint of a scale, a double bass turned into a resonant drum. The countertenor James Laing, in evening dress and “smoking” a cigar, acted as a smooth master of ceremonies. Under its current music director, Laurence Cummings, and his team, this annual Handel festival, founded in 1978, has stepped away from advocacy and put creativity and progress to the fore. Cummings was key to Opera North’s 2022 Orpheus, a European baroque-Indian classical collaboration. Last year, Thomas directed Vivaldi’s Bajazet at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury theatre. Both were pioneering highlights of a new, capacious and daring strand of musical theatre.
