The second of the Barbican’s Joyce DiDonato Artist Spotlight concerts was a performance of Alcina, Handel’s beautiful examination of the pervasive yet transient nature of desire. It gave us an opportunity to hear the American diva in the title role – she has not sung it complete in the UK until now – sharing the platform with an impressive lineup of Handelians, along with the English Concert under Harry Bicket. But despite fine individual achievements, the evening didn’t quite cohere.
DiDonato blended vocal brilliance with calculated, if at times wayward, insight. The role is associated with high sopranos and she is a mezzo: it says much for her technique that she sounded comfortable in sustained passages in her upper registers; and it says even more for her originality that she frequently deployed vocal decorations below the melodic line rather than above it, often to startling effect. Dramatically, she was less sympathetic than many. Dressed in post-punk Vivienne Westwood, all angled lines and dominatrix boots, her Alcina was not so much a woman trapped and destroyed by her own emotions as an arch-manipulator, whose power over others wanes as her ruthless behaviour is exposed.
Things elsewhere were variable. Affecting in slower numbers like Verdi Prati, Alice Coote, as Ruggiero, was pushed to her technical limits in places by some of Handel’s coloratura. There were great performances from Christine Rice, thrillingly accurate as principled Bradamante, and Ben Johnson as Oronte, nicely uppity, yet wonderfully touching in the scene in which he realises how much he still loves Anna Christy’s Morgana, despite her infidelities.
You can’t fault Christy’s precision, though her hard, bright tone isn’t quite right in Handel. Bicket’s conducting, meanwhile, was unaccountably prosaic and at times oddly austere in a work in which poetic sensuality is all: an off-night on his part, one hopes.
