Although the Santa Fe Opera has never shied away from popular favourites, some of their most rewarding productions have been devoted to lesser-performed works from all corners of the operatic canon; and while the operas of Handel may not seem ideally geared to a summer festival audience in search of easy entertainment, a total of seven of his operas have appeared on the Santa Fe stage since the mid-1980s. If this season’s Rodelinda – the first new Handel production since the delightful Alcina in 2017 – struggled to find a way into Nicola Francesco Haym’s loosely woven drama, a handful of fine voices and the consistently vigorous musical direction of Harry Bicket offer a compelling entry into the singular musical landscape of early eighteenth-century opera.
In both its plot and characters Rodelinda is reasonably typical of its time and place: if the libretto makes a nominal effort to situate its story within a particular political milieu – specifically the Kingdom of Lombardy in the seventh century – the events bear only a passing connection to anything attested in the historical record and are, in any event, far less important than the virtues, vices and passions that define each character.
The faithful Rodelinda, believing her husband Bertarido to be dead, is pressured into marriage by the new ruler Grimoaldo, although the latter’s pursuit may be driven less by a desire for power than the sting of his earlier rejection by Bertarido’s sister Eduige. Bertarido, who it turns out is still alive, is tormented by the prospect of his wife’s infidelity, but never loses the virtues – specifically clemency – that made him such a good ruler in the first place. Indeed the only irredeemable figure is the power-hungry Garibaldo, who manipulates both Eduige and Grimoaldo in his quest for the throne, but who meets a just fate before the obligatory happy ending.
If the conventions of opera seria provide ample opportunities for da capo arias meditating on the nature of various emotions, both the pace and structure offer their own particular challenges to the modern director. Handel, writing for the great voices of his day, could coast on the star power of his singers without being overly troubled by detailed period evocations or expressions of dramatic realism.
Lucy Crowe (Rodelinda), William Guanbo Su (Garibaldo) Maximilian Moore (Flavio), Meridian Prall (Eduige), Hugh Cutting (Unulfo), Anthony Gregory (Grimoaldo), in Handel: Rodelinda. Harry Bicket, conductor. R.B. Schlather, director. Santa Fe Opera 2026. © 2026 by Bronwen Sharp / Santa Fe Opera.
The Santa Fe staging, directed by R.B. Schlather, seemed perpetually troubled by the opera’s relative lack of concentrated drama, but seemed equally unable to commit to a coherent approach; it was simultaneously too fussy to leave one’s attention focussed solely on the singers, but too abstract to offer visual spectacle or emotional verisimilitude.
Much of the action was set in a single room containing a door, a window, a fireplace and little else, although some tables and chairs were brought on at various points in the evening. If the sets offered only a vague suggestion of the intended era, the dresses of Eduige and Rodelinda and the coat and top hat of Grimoaldo had a definite hint of the Victorian (albeit filtered through twenty-first century sensibilities). In any event the specific time and place of the setting contributed little to the action; rather, the staging seemed intent on drawing out the essence of each scene through expressive lighting and deliberate physical interactions.
Of the two approaches, the attempt to create memorable imagery through the use of light was arguably the more interesting (if not always the more successful). There were a handful of scenes in which the set was half in light and half in darkness, and there was much use of shadows. While such moments usually had their own logic – with the exception of one scene in the third act in which an excess of shadows served only to draw attention to its own artifice – they were often less successful than the scenes that abandoned setting altogether. When, halfway through the first act, the stage turned to reveal Bertarido trapped in an illuminated rectangle hovering over the orchestra pit, it offered exactly the kind of arresting image at which all the other lighting effects had merely hinted. Unfortunately it also served to make many of the subsequent scenes in the room seem all the more pedestrian. A staging set wholly in the world of placeless darkness might easily have heightened the intensity of the drama.
Instead the staging remained frustratingly uncertain, and the situation was only intensified by a treatment of character drama that was often muted to the point of flatness. Rodelinda’s demand that the Grimoaldo should kill her son was lacking in melodramatic spark, while the final scene, in which the surviving characters nominally celebrate the restoration of narrative balance was as sullen a tableau as has ever been paired with words proclaiming joy and triumph. But whenever the staging attempted to switch the focus to the physical interactions of the characters it often came across as laboured: Eduige’s dealings with Garibaldo in the first act added little to the drama, while Garibaldo’s manhandling of Grimoaldo in the third act was merely distracting.
Lucy Crowe (Rodelinda), Anthony Gregory (Grimoaldo), in Handel: Rodelinda. Harry Bicket, conductor. R.B. Schlather, director. Santa Fe Opera 2026. © 2026 by Bronwen Sharp / Santa Fe Opera.
In the absence of strongly delineated stage action, the evening’s most reliable sources of emotional involvement were the singers and the score itself. Although the acoustics of an open-air theatre may not have been ideally suited to the nuanced textures of baroque opera, both Iestyn Davies and Lucy Crowe gave compelling performances.
Mr Davies, despite not appearing until the second half of the first act, quickly established himself at the very heart of the drama: his first aria ‘Dove sei, amato bene’ was equal parts tenderness and sadness, all delivered with unfailing elegance. The anguish he brought to ‘Confusa si miri’ was equally convincing, while his surprise return in the second half of Act Two, featuring some of the evening’s most beautiful orchestral accompaniment, achieved a state of pastoral grace; and even after providing the evening with so many of its high points, he was still able to render the clemency of ‘Vivi, tiranno’ with triumphant energy.
Lucy Crowe, who has performed the role of Rodelinda several times in recent years, seemed to struggle against the size of the venue in her early scenes: while ‘Ho perduto il caro sposo’ and especially ‘L’empio rigor del fato’ were notable for their delicate tone and wealth of elegant details, they could also seem a touch underpowered. ‘Ombre, piante’ later in the first act was decidedly more outgoing, but it was the magnificent fury of ‘Spietati, io vi giurai’ that provided the evening with its most compelling jolt of pure drama. Yet if Rodelinda’s rage inspired Ms Crowe to greater heights of expression than the downcast sorrow of the earlier scenes, the optimism of ‘Ritorna, o caro’ and the tender duet with Bertarido at the end of the second act were equally compelling in a very different way.
If few of the other voices on stage could match Ms Crowe and Mr Davies, Meridian Prall’s Eduige had moments that came very close: the engaging ‘Lo farò’ was a showcase for her agile phrasing, while the spirited ‘De’ miei scherni’ was a delightful expression of desperate righteousness. Although Anthony Gregory’s high, clear tone was well suited to the morally ambiguous Grimoaldo, some of the subtleties in his delivery could get lost between the stage and the auditorium. If he never seemed entirely convincing as a tyrant, the torments of ‘Io già t’amai’ and ‘Prigioniera ho l’alma’ made it easy to accept the eventual redemption that was made apparent in the earnest patience of ‘Pastorello d’un povero armento’. As Garibaldo, the opera’s true villain, William Guanbo Su often sounded more commanding in the faster-paced action of the recitatives than the more measured pace of the arias: both ‘Di Cupido impiego’ and ‘Tirannia gli diede’ demanded greater menace. And while the character of Unulfo is somewhat peripheral, Hugh Cutting provided the evening with a handful of quietly elegant arias.
Harry Bicket guided the ensemble through a rhythmically charged reading of the score in which the bowed strings were held in pleasing balance with the percussive propulsion of the harpsichords and theorbos. While Mr Bicket rarely went out of his way to emphasise the mood of a given aria, his confident pacing allowed the thematic emotion of each scene to emerge naturally. But if Mr Bicket’s direction tended to highlight the taut rhythmic undercurrents in the score, he was equally capable of summoning passages of sustained lyricism: the accompaniment to Bertarido’s return in the second act, the unforced patience of Rodelinda and Bertarido’s ‘Io t’abbraccio’, and the hard-won calm of Grimoaldo’s ‘Pastorello’ were all notable for their arresting tranquillity.
Of course no visit to the Santa Fe Opera would be complete without the welcome interventions of the natural world; and while there were no sudden showers or flashes of lightning over the distant hills, on this evening an unexpected wind-storm conspired with the musical performances to intensify the already-heightened drama in the early scenes of Act Three. Such moments, while impossible to plan, rarely fail to bestow their own particular magic on evenings at this unique house.
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