![]() On the main stage was Handel’s Theodora, while a few levels below, Irish National Opera presented their new production of Bajazet in the Linbury Theatre the first time a Vivaldi opera has played at Covent Garden. Booth’s high coloratura sits marginally too high for the role and her coloratura became unruly under pressure, but the sheer audaciousness of her fiery “Qual guerriero” set the evening ablaze. Lovers of Baroque opera faced an enviable dilemma at the Royal Opera House on Friday evening. She also gets the opera’s most famous arias, “Sposa son disprezzata” (borrowed from Giacomelli´s Merope), presented here as a moment of cynicism rather than as the typical lament, and “Vedrò con mio diletto”, sung with a melting legato. Someone needs to cast her as Cleopatra immediately – I’ll be there in the front row! But it’s Claire Booth’s barnstorming Irene that ultimately walked away with the show, imperious and entitled as the power-hungry princess. Miskelly’s “Anche il mar” dazzled with her consistency of tone and confident coloratura. (The Enchanted Island at the Met was a modern-day example.) Vivaldi composed nine of the arias, plus the extensive recitatives. Soprano Aoife Miskelly possesses the most beautiful instrument in the cast, revealing an exquisite pearly soprano in her opening “Nasce rosa lusinghiera”. The Bajazet score belongs to a genre common in the eighteenth century, the pasticcioan opera pulled together from a variety of musical sources. Similarly, the servant Idaspe is somewhat detached from the machinations of the plot, serving as both bystander and narrator. ![]()
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