First performed in 1738, Faramondo has long been regarded as one of Handel’s problem pieces. Written while he was recovering from a stroke, it’s disquietingly bleak, and the dramaturgy is puzzling. The opera examines the relationships between desire and war and explores queasy ideas of sexual and military conquest. Yet there’s no real plot, only a static emotional gridlock, in which two pairs of men, allied on each side of an age-old conflict, find themselves rivals for women in the enemy camp: the protagonists, none of them remotely sympathetic, react rather than act throughout.
A collaboration between the London Handel festival and the RCM International Opera School, William Relton’s staging relocates the work to some nameless modern urban hellhole. There are overtones of both The Godfather and West Side Story as mafiosi and bike gangs fight for control of the streets and knife-wielding psychopaths lurk round every corner. It’s consistently well sung, though Ida Ränzlöv’s Faramondo and Harriet Eyley as his sister Clotilde are particularly outstanding. Ränzlöv blazes through her arias with thrilling conviction; Eyley, silver-toned and effortless, is by turns virtuosic and exquisite.
Timothy Morgan makes a truly creepy, glue-sniffing Gernando. Beth Moxon is the glamorous, self-assured Rosimonda, Kieran Rayner the imperious Gustavo.
Laurence Cummings’ stylish conducting leaves us in no doubt as to the quality of the score, which contains some of Handel’s most striking music. It all makes for cool, clever and deeply unnerving entertainment.
• At the Britten theatre, Royal College of Music, London, until 25 March. Box office: 01460 54660.
