The Sunday Times

Independent Opera's Orlando raises Hugh Canning's spirits

By Hugh Canning

" ... Independent Opera’s Orlando raises Hugh Canning’s spirits...."

"....Independent Opera’s staging of the later Orlando deserves a mention — even though its brief run at the Lilian Baylis Studio theatre at Sadler’s Wells is over — mainly because its director, the very young Alessandro Talevi, at least attempted to take Handel’s dramaturgy at face value and allowed his fine young cast to sing without too many upstaging distractions.

His set design ingeniously enclosed the small orchestra inside an acting platform resembling the rings around the planet Saturn — both Orlando and his mentor, the magus Zoroastro, are stargazers, looking for signs of destiny in the heavens.

As in the Scots Tamerlano, the cuts were regrettable, and compounded here by Gary Cooper’s turgid beat in some of the slow arias, which I feared would never end, but this was an enjoyable evening on the whole, thanks to some very promising singing by William Towers, a little unheroic perhaps for Orlando, Joana Seara’s enchanting Dorinda and Rebecca Ryan’s grand-voiced Angelica. Christopher Ainslie’s buff Medoro was easier on the eye than on the ear, while Nicholas Warden got round Zoroastro’s fiendish bravura numbers without accident ..."

© INDEPENDENT OPERA
Registered Charity no. 1117559