A dazzling 'tour de force' Handel's 'Giulio Cesare' - enjoyed by ROBERT ANDERSON 'Graham Pushee sings with utmost bravura, fire and clarity ...'

Haym as librettist and Handel as composer connived at adjusting the ages of Caesar and Cleopatra so as to deprive the one of his baldness and to grant the other so experienced a coquetry that, in this production, she is prepared to seduce while semi-submerged in a bathtub. It matters not a jot that the mournful Cornelia as Pompey's widow never set foot in Egypt, nor that Sesto was stepson to her and not son. Bernard Shaw's Ptolemy XIII is vastly preferable to Haym's, a petulant boy rather than lascivious and sadistic tyrant. So much for history, which has hardly bothered with opera.

Continue >>

For help listening to the sound extracts here, please refer to our questions & answers page.