Intense and Believable

Nicholas Hyntner's 1985 production of Handel's Xerxes at the London Coliseum influenced how a whole generation of opera lovers thought about Handel's 1731 opera. James Conway, director of English Touring Opera's new production of Xerxes (seen in London at the Royal College of Music's Britten Theatre, 8 October 2011), says in the programme book that such was the long shadow cast by Hyntner's production that it gave him pause, before deciding to take on the opera. In fact Conway's account of Xerxes was strikingly different in conception to Hyntner's.

Handel used a seventeenth century Venetian libretto as the basis for the opera...