HANDEL, novamente.

Theodora
Geoff Brown at the Barbican
I looked around. No outsize broken bottles. No lethal injections on hospital gurneys. No baffling, maddening semaphore gestures. This was not Peter Sellars’s eccentric opera version of Handel’s oratorio Theodora; though the memory of that Glyndebourne landmark was hard to escape. Emmanuelle Haïm, Le Concert d’Astrée, and the soloists certainly kept it close in their minds: the performance was dedicated to the memory of the late mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson — so searing and engulfing at Glyndebourne in the role of the heroine’s friend Irene.