The London Handel Festival takes place across the city but its young Opera Studio is perhaps its most peripatetic element. Launched in 2023 at the Stone Nest in the West End before sailing over in 2024 to Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, the company lands this year at the grand neoclassical Shoreditch Town Hall.
Designed by the improbably named Caesar Augustus Long, it makes an apt setting for a mythical double bill of Apollo and Daphne and The Choice of Hercules. However, the staging of these early and late-career concert works about the two gods — half-brothers, we are reminded — felt slightly more yoked together than well integrated, as did the production’s mixture of theatre, music and dance, although you could still appreciate the quality of the individual elements.
The distance between the two halves was widened by the conceit of the first, which the director Thomas Guthrie transports to the mid-century milieu of Mad Men. The stately baritone Dan D’Souza is a smarmy suited-and-booted Apollo pursuing the paper-shuffling Daphne (sung flutteringly by Lauren Lodge-Campbell) in a case of workplace harassment. But the members of the New English Ballet Theatre, directed by Valentino Zucchetti of the Royal Ballet, came on in leafy leotards, hinting at Daphne’s final form as a laurel tree in the original myth.
The accomplished dancers performed polished sequences inspired by Singin’ in the Rain, complete with umbrellas, but they might have been more elegantly integrated into the new concept. The same goes for the excellent instrumentalists from the consistently bright and buoyant La Nuova Musica, directed by an irrepressible David Bates, who were occasionally brought on stage. Some costumes (trench coats to protect against the rain?) might have worked wonders.
Apollo and Daphne’s more fiery exchanges were dampened by the decision to have their emotive gestures kept to a minimum so that they could be manipulated by the dancers like puppets. This idea was then carried over as the focal point of the more successful, if busy, second work of the evening, where a statuesque though surprisingly expressive whitewashed bust represented the boy Hercules, who is torn between Pleasure and Virtue.
Madison Nonoa sang the former with all the allure of a Disney princess who knows too much while her rival’s wonderfully forthright mezzo-soprano Bethany Horak-Hallett could have mobilised an army. Standing behind the puppet/bust throughout, James Hall blazed his own brilliant path as Hercules with his cut-glass countertenor. His first aria, Yet can I hear that dulcet lay — the piece’s best known — was a rare oasis of calm where the music could shine through, as it did in the choruses, sung lustily from the balconies.
★★★☆☆
135min
Shoreditch Town Hall, London, to Mar 29, london-handel-festival.com
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