Handel’s Hercules with the English Concert

When it was first performed in 1745, Handel’s Hercules was an abject failure – lasting only two nights, the negative reaction forced the composer to pull his entire season. Audiences at the time were shocked by its hybrid genre of ‘musical drama,’ performed in the theatre like an opera yet with the limited stage action of the oratorio. It took until the cusp of the twentieth century for critics to acclaim it one of the jewels in Handel’s crown.

Now the English Concert, led by their music director Harry Bicket, take to the Barbican for a one-off performance. What Hercules lacks in dramatic action, it more than makes up for in musical invention. Beginning with a stately orchestral overture, the piece soars with tremendous interludes and passionate arias that demand virtuosic power from soloists, choir and orchestra alike. Based on the ninth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, this is not the heroic Hercules of the Twelve Labours. Rather it’s the tragic denouncement of his life, an urgent tale of suspicion and marital infidelity on Olympian scale.

Born in Liverpool, Harry Bicket has blazed a trail through baroque music. A talented harpsichordist and organist, as an adolescent he was organ scholar at Windsor Castle and sub-organist at Westminster Abbey. After standing in at a Glyndebourne performance of Handel’s Theodora, he moved into conducting. In 2006, he succeeded founder Trevor Pinnock as the director of the English Consort, Europe’s leading baroque chamber orchestra. Of their recordings together, Lucy Crowe’s first solo collection of Handel arias has been especially praised. 

Matthew Rose – winner of the 2012 Critics Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent – stars as Hercules. Seasoned Handel interpreter Alice Coote plays the hero’s grief-stricken wife Dejanira, while powerhouse soprano Lucy Crowe and oratorio specialist James Gilchrist take on the secondary roles of Iole and Hyllus. The English Concert Choir will accompany. With such a distinguished cast, the production is sure to soar.