It’s high season for pastoral operas in Buxton: while the Opera House plays host to Bellini’s La sonnambula and Mozart’s Il re pastore, Liberata Collective has been selling out its sister venue, the Pavilion Arts Centre, with its production of Handel’s Orlando. Drawn, as were his Ariodante and Alcina, from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso, the opera introduces magic and madness into its picturesque hills and groves, as the knight Orlando is driven to distraction, and very nearly murder, by his unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica.
Though not one of his smash hits, Orlando is one of Handel’s most original scores, breaking up the conventional succession of da capo arias with shorter sung passages, ensembles, and a remarkable mad scene for the title character. Fittingly, Liberata Collective is not your standard-issue Baroque ensemble either. Founded by sopranos Susanna MacRae and Olivia Doutney, its troupe of singers is devoted to the art of Baroque gesture: the intricate language of movements, postures and even stage positions which, in an age long before surtitles, allowed 18th-century audiences to follow a complex plot whether or not they understood the text being sung.
In a staging devised collectively (again in line with Baroque-era practices) by the singers themselves, any preconceptions of park-and-bark or overblown pantomime acting are put swiftly to bed. Gestures flow into one another with surprisingly fluidity: if not exactly naturalistic, there’s an appealingly balletic quality to them, with the occasional more exaggerated movement – a sudden swoon, or a swish of the cape – usually serving a clear dramatic purpose. They function in tandem with, rather than in place of, the translated text, which appears on side screens and in the programme booklet, and, it’s fair to say, still does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of conveying the finer points of the plot.
Jolyon Loy cut an imposing figure, vocally and physically, as Zoroastro, although his rich-hued baritone was taxed somewhat by faster moving passages. Joanna Harries was an elegant Medoro, Olivia Doutney a regal, vividly-sung Angelica, and while Susanna MacRae’s soprano is on the slender side for the space, her facility for vocal as well as gestural expression made for a winning performance. In the title role, Christian Joel (credited as a tenor but very much in countertenor mode) sang with commitment and beauty of timbre, but both voice and stage presence were too soft-focus to fully convince. The seven instrumentalists of Ensemble Hesperi, led by violinist and conductor Adrian Butterfield, brought impressive colour to a reduced orchestration, although they, like the singers, were limited by the Pavilion Arts Centre’s less than congenial acoustic – it’s tempting to wonder how much more at home this show would look and sound in the gilded Opera House next door.
As a piece of carefully wrought historical recreation, and as a challenge to preconceived notions about the role of movement in operatic acting, this Orlando surely achieves its aims. Where it’s less successful, arguably, is as a piece of theatre qua theatre. The “rules” of Baroque gesture may not inherently inhibit dramatic insight, but in this case they seem to have come at the cost of exploring the central plot – Orlando’s descent into madness and the danger it poses to those around him – in a meaningful way. We’ve seen an intriguing approach to a Baroque opera, certainly; we’ve understood the gist of its characters' emotions and amorous tangles. But whether we’ve actually seen Orlando, in all its inventive splendour is harder to say. The method has its merits: it just needs a bit more madness.
