It is a privilege to hear Yvonne Kenny in Purcell’s Dido and Æneas.  She now has enormous authority and stage presence and a complete mastery of tone colour, which makes her performance of the celebrated Lament the real, penetrating unbearable climax that it should be.

Patrick Nolan’s 2004 production, in revival, remains ingenious and practical, touching and restrained, with moments of real and delightful humour – not only in the sailor’s chorus, but the witchcraft scene with Karen Breen as the Sorcerer, whose performance was the most startling

and enlivening of the evening. Luke Gabbedy’s Æneas was at first a little pallid, but as his voice warmed became highly effective and touching. Gabriela Tylesova’s setting and costumes still work perfectly well.

Acis and Galatea is perhaps Handel’s most sylvan and rural opera, with ‘happy nymphs and happy swains’ enjoying a relaxed life amid the ‘verdant plains and woody mountains’. Patrick Nolan sets his new production as a twenty-first century cocktail party, with deviant sex and cocaine-sniffing freely available. Polyphemus sings ‘Ruddier than the cherry’ while trying to seduce Acis, and the lovers sing their seductive love duet while determinedly backing away from each other.  Close-ups of the singers periodically appear on a gauze lowered between the stage and the audience, and the ‘gentle, murm’ring stream’ is represented by a video shot of the sea. Everyone will have their favourite moment in this production, this reviewer particularly enjoying that when a hapless member of the chorus wanders aimlessly across the stage clutching a candelabra to his head.

The alienation felt by most of the audience as they realised that almost every moment of delight and humour in the libretto was going to be denied them seemed to communicate itself to the singers on the evening I attended, and while it remained a pleasure to hear how considerably Henry Choo continues to develop with each appearance for the company, and while Shane Lawrencev and Kanen Breen were unexceptional as Damon and Polyphemus, there was an unmistakable sense of an uphill battle being fought. The always dependable Taryn Fiebig as both Galatea and Belinda maintained an even and mellifluous tone together with a collected presence and particularly effective mime. The singing of the Opera Australia chorus was as usual exemplary. In the pit was the extremely distinguished Orchestra of the Antipodes, a treat for all admirers of performances with period instruments. Antony Walker conducted Purcell faultlessly, with precisely the right balance of brio and tenderness. His tempi in Handel were more questionable – the overture started at a pace so frantic that it was almost incoherent, and from time to time almost pressed the singers too hard.

An evening that promised to be joyful for all lovers of the baroque ended up, then, in curate’s egg territory. Those who are roused to fury when a director apparently sets out to destroy an opera will do well to avoid Mr Nolan’s Handel; those who admire an intelligent and insighted production should come in, after the interval, for the Purcell, where they will find nothing to distress them except perhaps the contrast between Dido’s magnificent gown and Æneas’s bomber jacket. – Derek Parker