Handel: Tamerlano

One of Handel's best operas, gorgeously sung and played under the expert baton of McCreesh. If you don't mind a bit of ending-spoiler, I'd watch the interview with McCreesh first. Note that he speaks mainly about plot, acting, and music—giving brief, faint praise to the visual aspects. As he says, this is an unusually dark and grim story for Handel, yet the production is garishly lit, its stark modernism clashing with the elaborate costuming. Much of the stage business has a comic, even clownish effect wildly out of synch with the opera seria style of the work.All the singers are impressive and great to listen to, even Domingo heroically taking on his first Baroque role. Because two major roles originally created for castrati are taken by women this is a female-dominated cast. Not a problem in Baroque opera, where cross-dressing is common, though usually it's male countertentors performing the high parts.The interview with conductor McCreesh explains the jarring twist of the ending, wrenching the mood from high tragedy to typical Baroque sudden happy ending style. Handel wrote the happy ending first, but ended up revising the opera to give it the darker conclusion. The decision to perform both endings in sequence is jarring, but has the virtue giving us all of Handel's music--making for a very long performance.The singers are all skilled at performing ornamentation in their arias in authentic style. You really need to enjoy this sort of thing to enjoy this opera. Most of the action is in the musical notes being sung."Dancers" mostly stand around stock-still or make minimal movements.The English subtitles are truly awful, often collapsing into gibberish. They look like something created by Google Translate with a badly designed pseudo-Shakespeare filter created by someone for whom English was a second language. But I suspect they were just a rush job done by the Italian librettist for sale to opera-goers in Handel's day--a common practice. Note the frequent tortured word order enabling the writer to put rhyming words at the end of lines. This must be a singing text--surely one of the worst ever written. Just read the plot summary on this page and you'll have the sense of the plot.I wish I'd bought the Christophe Rousset Blu-ray version instead, titled "Alcina & Tamerlano", but I have to admit this version provides a very satisfying musical experience.

Just wanted to get my two cents in here since there is only one review so far. This is a very good dvd of Tamerlano, and I think it is much more interesting than the Pinnock dvd. The production is typical Graham Vick, which is to say: stylish, thoughtful, a little unconventional but still very true to the work. He contributes some new ideas here and there, but in a respectful way. The costumes vaguely suggest 18th c. ideas of turquerie, but are schematic and exaggerated in some cases, with sober white costumes setting Bajazet and his daughter apart from the rest of the characters. Tamerlano himself (Monica Bacelli) is a sort of flamboyant, Liberace-type character with very colorful costumes and lots of makeup, who interpolates some turkish-looking dance moves into his arias. Very neat idea for this character, as his arias are very bouncy and dancelike tunes (shades of the McVicker Giulio Cesare? perhaps). Asteria also is very well sung, and brings interesting middle-eastern style hand gestures into her first aria. Domingo's Bajazet is good, altho he is not really a Handel singer, but this role suits him, and he is much more convincing as a father figure than some Bajazets are (young tenors don't seem grave enough...Randle is very young on the Pinnock dvd, and not really made to look old). Mingardo's Andronico is well sung, although I thought she wasn't as comfortable in the trouser role; not charismatic, but vocally has the ability for this very, very difficult Senesino role.As with Graham Vick's production of Mitridate re di Ponto from Covent Garden (also on DVD), there are groups of dancers who sometimes contribute to the ebb and flow of the emotions and music in the arias. In only case case did I feel this didn't work quite right (Leone's aria). It was a wonderful idea, and in fact, if you have seen that dvd of Mitridate, you can have a good idea of the overall feel of this production. My only complaint about the dvd is that the video director made some annoying choices. He regularly focuses on Paul McCreesh and the orchestra for longish periods of time, even though things are happening onstage. I don't want to see the orchestra that much, and especially with a production as stimulating as this one, I want to see every moment onstage. He also didn't do a good job of focusing on, or even showing, the dancers sometimes. It was almost like he didn't like the dancing and wanted to show it as little as possible. This was really annoying. Finally, when Domingo was singing, he seemed to just want to go closer up on Domingo and ignore everything else on stage entirely. Bad move. I hate it when a stupid video director makes weird choices and ruins a perfect performance (Pierre Audi's dvd of Zoroastre is another example of this). However, I should close by saying that the director doesn't do this kind of thing constantly, and overall he avoids close-up, going in only for waist length shots usually, which I like better. So it is good in that respect most of the time.Overall: highly recommended. Certainly better than Pinnock's, and worth getting even if you are new to Handel opera. I sold my dvd of the Pinnock one. This is great. I think there are lengthy clips from it on YouTube if you want to sample it before you buy this very expensive set.

Georg Frideric Handel’s opera Tamerlano is blessed with wonderful arias, notably for the tenor soloist who sings the role of Bajazet and it’s regarded as one of the first dramatic and virtuoso tenor roles in opera history. This role is sung by Placido Domingo on my recording. It’s a dramatic work altogether and warmly recommended!

It appears that this is a very complicated and difficult opera. I can imagine it's not so easy to find out all the actors who are perfect at the roles. The leading characters Bacelli and Mingardo are both veteran singers. They did great in the performance, but for me their voices sounded similar to each other. Bohlin is a Sedish soprano. I felt myself have difficulty to match her appearance to Asteria.

I enjoyed this opera which has good singing, a great staging wonderful playing and Domingo. What a shame it is spoilt by crap English subtitles. At this price up with this we should not put have to.

\good singing needed better scenery

Enjoyed immensely: something quite different from Domingo for a change !