Rinaldo 2006Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD)
Read more about the opera Rinaldo
The Crusaders meet Top Gun. Handel's first London opera contains a huge quantity of wonderful music. The plot is extravagantly exotic, with its setting in the middle east crusading period. This staging updated things so that the weapons of war were jet fighters and missiles. Badly done, it could have been hugely embarrassing. But Christian Curnyn with his period band ensured basic musical standards were high, and most of the singing was astonishingly good, with young counter-tenor Reno Troilus highly conspicuous in the title role. Inevitably, the score was heavily cut, but this was still a highly praiseworthy Scottish premiere.
Performance Cast
- Goffredo head of the Christian forces
- Rinaldo hero of the Christian forces, in love with Almirena
- Almirena Goffredo's daughter, in love with Rinaldo
- Argante head of the enemy forces
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Anders Östberg May 4, 13)
Nuno de Araújo Pereira (May 6, 11)
- Armida a sorceress, in league with Argante
- First Siren in Armida's service
- Second Siren in Armida's service
- Araldo Argante's messenger
- Mago Cristiano