Ovid and Handel at Brighton Early Music Festival 2019 - review

‘Ovid and Handel’ at Brighton Early Music Festival 2019 (BREMF), St Martin’s Church Lewes Rd, The BREMF Singers, director John Hancorn; The BREMF Players, leader Alison Bury.

Secular Handel (1685-1759) – Cantata: ‘Apollo e Dafne’ HMW 122 with Apollo, John Lee bass-baritone; Dafne, Elspeth Piggott soprano. Exerpts from ‘Semele’ HMV58 with Semele, Lucinda Cox soprano; Jupiter, Sebastian Maclaine tenor; Juno/Ino, Bethany Horak-Hallett mezzo-soprano.

It’s the first Saturday after a midweek Guy Fawkes Night in an age when celebrating the Gunpowder Plot discovery is a moveable November feast. It’s 7.30pm and a big fireworks display at The Level explodes into at least half an hour’s action.

Meanwhile, on the same eve of Remembrance Day, a few hundred yards away, in a concert starting at the same moment, English music’s favourite adopted German, George Friderick Handel, is also being celebrated. And in another towering BREMF church with the kind of reverberant acoustic that fireworks adore. The connection’s a giveaway. This must be a performance of Handel’s famous Music for the Royal Fireworks!

Actually, no – although the seed could well have been sown for that to happen on the same Saturday next year. What BREMF had planned was a sequence of instrumental and vocal items needing a bit of peace and quiet to be able to hear and follow. While the fireworks banged and boomed around outside and overhead, Ovid’s Metamorphosis played out on the floor inside with certain gods up to more of their mucking about.

Cocky Apollo, in slaying the monster scourge Python, declares himself archery champion. Not to be so ephemerally dethroned, the prolific Cupid unerringly targets him, sentencing Apollo to a doomed amorous of Dafne. Ultimately, the chaste nymph is famously protected by Diana, by transformation into an impregnable laurel tree.