The London Handel festival has always offered plenty of opportunities to hear the composer’s music in his own church, St George’s, Hanover Square. But this year, like last, the most interesting event takes audiences somewhere unfamiliar: to Trinity Buoy Wharf this time, an old storehouse on a windswept Docklands bank just across from the O2. As an optional extra you can even travel there by boat, serenaded by an oboe-bassoon quartet. As you prepare to disembark, the conceit of Jack Furness’s production begins to kick in. The charming onboard host turns out to be the assistant director of a film company, here to give us a gentle heads-up about his boss before we sit in on a shoot – for a film of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo. He’s visionary but volatile, we’re warned. Things may get heated.
And they do, gratifyingly so, thanks to the riveting performances Furness gets from his cast – three singers, plus the actor Durassie Kiangangu as the assistant. The bullying director we’re warned about is Polifemo – a lustful cyclops in the mythical story Handel was retelling – and his victims are his two stars. The drama unfolds around and within the film shoot, in front of us and onscreen, via handheld camera. The film and a translation of the Italian text are projected on to a huge double door which, in a gesture that seems almost magical in context, slides open to let Galatea the sea nymph – or perhaps the singer playing her – walk out into the darkness, the water and the twinkling lights beyond.
It’s all a bit meta, and by the time we’re watching a film of the film of the character in front of us this should by rights all be disappearing up itself. Yet, as designed by Francis O’Connor and lit by Emma Chapman, it’s so stylishly done that it works. Moreover, the rehearsals and retakes of the film shoot provide neat context for Handel’s da capo arias, in which the second part of the song is followed by a repeat of the first, often with more intense decoration: the clapperboard snaps, and – once more, with feeling.
The cast is excellent. Mary Bevan and Claudia Huckle are Aci and his/her lover, Bevan’s soprano gleaming, Huckle’s mezzo lusciously expressive. Polifemo is the bass Callum Thorpe, his voice imposing in the villainous bluster and moving in his moments of despair. The only downside to the setup is that the band and singers do at times get briefly uncoupled – an extra camera, this one on the conductor, might have helped. Still, this detracts little from the vigorous playing of the London Handel Orchestra, conducted from the harpsichord by Laurence Cummings. This is Cummings’s 25th and final season as the LHF’s musical director, and he’s going out on a high.
• London Handel festival runs until 20 April.
