Review: Welsh National Opera: Orlando

Perhaps it’s a 70^th birthday thing, but this season Welsh National Opera is experiencing an extended moment of madness. All three productions dwell on the theme: and, sandwiched between the bel canto of Bellini’s I Puritani and Sondheim’s cut-throat finger-lickin’-good Sweeney Todd (a debut excursion into musicals for the company) steps the first of Handel’s trio of operatic flirtations with Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso – the story of a knight who loses first his love and then his reason before (here, at any rate) being magicked back into resigned acceptance and sanity.

Actually, in Harry Fehr’s cunningly-contrived staging, ‘magicked’ isn’t quite right. The action has been relocated to an early-1940s psychiatric hospital in which ace airman Orlando, a post-traumatic-stress patient, is being treated by head shrink Zoroastra. When Angelica (an angel by name, if not by nature) falls for recovering invalid Medoro, Orlando is emotionally torn to pieces – and nurse Dorinda isn’t too happy either having harboured loving thoughts over the bed pans.

It’s a conceit that resonates intelligently with the original. It might not necessarily add much, but at the same time it doesn’t intrude, and there’s nothing like a hospital for providing endless distractions to visually liven up the directorial challenges of the lengthy baroque da capo aria. Along the way come Mozartian allusions such as Cosi fan Tutte’s spoof mesmerism when Orlando is subjected to electrotherapy, and Papageno’s threatened suicide springs to mind when the distraught fighter pilot tries to end it all by slinging his electric cables over a beam to hang himself.

There’s even a pertinent plug for Sweeney Todd as he brandishes a cut-throat razor at one point. Add in Andrzej Goulding’s revealing video interjections and this is a show whose visual vocabulary and intellectual integrity are deftly balanced.

It’s a balance enshrined in the musical values too. Concerto Italiano’s founding maestro Rinaldo Alessandrini runs a tight ship from the pit (even if he uncharacteristically made heavy weather of the beguiling twittering that opens Act II). Responsible for WNO’s Poppea a few years back, his Handel proved as suavely stylish as his Monteverdi; and, enriched with two theorbos and harpsichord to increase the alluring ‘thrum’ factor, the orchestra responded adroitly to his period instrument exhortations.

In the title role, countertenor-of-the-moment Lawrence Zazzo combined honeyed vocal elegance with coloratura agility, though his physical portrayal of mental disintegration sometimes seemed to confuse madness with drunkenness, and baring a few teeth does not, alone, derangement display. Daniel Grice’s bow-tied psychiatrist maintained a Sarastro-like dignity, while the contrasting, well-nigh sovereign sopranos of Rebecca Evans and Fflur Wyn all but stole the as Angelica and Dorinda respectively. Handel with care, and no mistake! 

Welsh National Opera complete their Hippodrome stay with Sweeney Todd from Thur, Oct 22 to Sat, Oct 24. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.atgtickets.com/shows/sweeney-todd-wno/bristol-hippodrome

Pic: Bill Cooper