The Gran Teatre del Liceu’s 2017/2018 season opened with Rossini’s dramma giocoso Il viaggio a Reims, the “event piece” written exclusively for the coronation of France’s Charles X in Reims in 1825. Apart from the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro (one of the co-producers), this otherwise infrequently performed work has received a bright yet perhaps over-minimalist staging by Emilio Sagi. A fixed set portraying the sun deck and furnishings of a spa hotel (using only the stage front) provides the opera’s eclectic group of European aristocrats an unexpectedly informal aspect from the outset, replete with bathrobes, towels and slippers. This is novel, but confuses the audience as to who is who in the story. Not until the end of the second act, an hour and a half into the performance, does the cast change to more formal dining attire and the audience has a minimally clearer idea of the different nationalities (and idiosyncracies) portrayed.

Like Handel’s Orlando (1732) and Ariodante (1734), Alcina derives from the narrative material in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. The story of the sorceress Alcina, an initially hedonistic, manipulative woman who later finds herself a victim of love, fits into the genre of the ‘magical opera’ with numerous magical elements, but Handel achieved considerable emotional authenticity in his characterisations. This makes Alcina one of the most deeply felt and multifaceted operas. ‘You may despise what you like ; but you cannot contradict Handel,’ said the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. As in Tamerlano, Pierre Audi based this production on the stage at the baroque theatre at Drottningholm, for which he originally developed the directing concept. His set is thus based on the principles of perspective, with wings in the form of painted panels. The result is marvellous modern musical theatre in a historizing frame.