A Night With Handel DVD

Sultry sopranos and contraltos brood in candle-lit churches or at the top of a shopping mall escalator; a shaven-headed tough menaces enemies with a knife, singing of vengeance and death in a terrifying counter-tenor rasp; a couple sing of fulfilment in the back of a limousine. Jonathan Keates remarks in his accompanying lecture that the heroes and heroines of Handel's opera are real people, whose passions transcend the baroque libretti they are singing; by taking them out of full-bottomed wigs and panniered frocks and putting them at large in contemporary London at... night, this interesting documentary reminds us of the immediacy of these arias. This would not work, of course, were not the performances exemplary in their own right and presented with a driving urgency that takes us away from the pieties of the oratorio tradition and reminds us what a superb and popular man of the theatre Handel was. --Roz KaveneyOn the DVD: The DVD comes with the narration in English, French and German, and subtitles in those languages. The arias are also playable as audio only. --Roz Kaveney [show more]

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