Review: Handel: Giulio Cesare ***

Handel’s epic opera Giullo Cesare was the Hollywood blockbuster of its day, his requirement for spectacular staging presenting problems to modern directors, particularly in today’s financial climate.

Tim Albery’s new production for Opera North opens with a large tomb that rotates to capture the changing scenes. Lighting effects splendidly create the internal opulence of the Egyptian palace and costumes represent many different historical eras through to the present day, a sadly overused modern operatic cliché.

In this truncated performance of the original score the vocal casting is good, and if the choice of a female Cesare divides opinion, the young Pamela Helen Stephen readily meets the dramatic demands of the score.

Yet it is the excellence of James Laing’s counter-tenor, in the supposedly weak character of Ptolemy, that produces such a vibrant presence, it is he who becomes the more imposing person. Sarah Tynan as Cleopatra dispatches vocal acrobatics with exemplary agility, but looks too young for a role that requires a more mature realisation.

Of the eight principal characters, the company debut of Kathryn Rudge as Sesto really captured the attention. Recently a student at the Royal Northern College of Music, she is a mezzo of outstanding potential.

Neat and well-balanced playing from the orchestra of Opera North was conducted with suitable urgency by Robert Howarth.

Jan 25, Feb 7, 10 and 16.

Nigel Kennedy *****

York Grand Opera House

Sheena Hastings

NIGEL Kennedy, with his punkish hair, trousers decorated with safety pins and Doc Marten boots, has an approach and style that’s about moving with the movements and using a piece’s basic shape as a departure point. This show consists of his own composition The Four Elements and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to start an amazing musical journey. Accompanied by the marvellous strings of the Orchestra of Life, two sets of drums, two electric guitars, a jazz trumpeter, the percussionist from Massive Attack, and four singers with voices blended into the whole like another instrument, Kennedy moves between his Stradivarius and an electric violin, which is at times boosted into wailing effects by a Moog synthesiser controlled by foot pedals. Despite the pyrotechnics, the energy, earthiness and sheer brilliance of the music-making are what lure you in and fix your whole attention on this ensemble and the man in the middle with the sorcerer’s command of all about him. His 2012 take on the Four Seasons is intensely flavoursome and urgent, peppered with bongos and trumpet, and interrupted now and then for a side order of something else. One such detour is via a couple of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, sublime musical conversations between Kennedy and the gifted cellist Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska. New sounds, semi-improvised riffs (full marks to orchestra leader Lizzie Ball for following Kennedy’s mercurial cues), a touch of Hendrix here, a spot of Duke Ellington there. These musicians had a ball, and so did we.