Handel: Hercules, The English Concert, Barbican, review: 'more Albert Square than Hanover Square'

Handel’s Hercules doesn’t present the hero one expects. The Labours are behind him, mentioned only in passing in Thomas Broughton’s libretto, and he finds himself succumbing to a storm of jealousy whipped up by his wife, Dejanira. He doesn’t appear until we’re well into the first act, either, and is despatched by her – by means of a poisoned robe – some time before the end of the third. That tragedy is then neatly ushered out of sight with the impending marriage of his son, Hyllus, to Iole, the cause of his wife’s jealousy.

Designated ’musical drama’, the piece occupies an ambiguous middle ground between opera and oratorio, and was a flop when unveiled to a thrill-seeking public in London at the beginning of 1745. It’s a rich and rewarding score, though, and offers, in its two female principals, psychologically astute studies in unfounded jealousy and wronged innocence – Hercules’s demise is collateral damage. The centrality of those ideas was underlined by the English Concert’s performance, which came to the Barbican after visits to Vienna, Paris and Birmingham, and especially in Alice Coote’s Dejanira.

Coote’s expressionistic delivery – peppered with wild emphases and tortured twists and turns, as well as moments of great beauty – is an acquired taste, and her acting here was arguably more Albert Square than Hanover Square. But there was no arguing with the power of her madness scene, or of her rage in Act 2, so tangible that the violins seemed compelled to echo her disdain for ’Venus and her whining boy’ by introducing mocking slides of their own.

The effect would have been more powerful had Coote conveyed the slightest sanity earlier on, though. As Iole, Elizabeth Watts was hardly less eloquent through more conventional means, singing with appropriate and moving purity but unveiling fierce temperament – and pinpoint coloratura – when it was called for. As the surprisingly jovial Hercules, Matthew Rose sang with burly voice and easy-going charm, but also produced the necessary gravitas at his death, vividly supported by the orchestra under Harry Bicket, who offered brilliantly virtuosic and dramatically engaged accompaniment throughout.

The Choir of the English Concert was excellent, too. A particular highlight was its singing of ’Jealousy! Infernal pest’, the gnarly, tense chorus that concluded the concert’s first half (the interval came half way through Act 2). James Gilchrist’s eloquent Hyllus and the sweet-voiced Rupert Enticknap, who made the most of the dreary herald Lichas, completed the cast.