(...) Under its new boss, early music specialist Bernhard Forck, the Handel Festival Orchestra in Halle can build on a competence in Handel that has grown over many years for its "Orlando" (1733). With Owen Willetts as Orlando and Dmitry Egorov as Medoro, there are also two excellent countertenors on stage. Marie Friederike Schöder finds dramatic verve as Angelica, and Christoph Stegemann also brings a rock-solid magician Zoroastro to the stage. Musically, then, the output here was also considerable. Scenically, "Orlando" has its pitfalls, for here, too, the madness of love has method in a pronounced confusion of "who-loves-who?". And above all the "who-loves-who-not". In the magic opera, which is more of a relationship opera, Handel relies on the melodiously swinging emotions of the lovers, the disappointed and those who despair to the point of madness. Orlando himself is only brought back from madness by ei rather drastically intervening lieto fine that resurrects all the dead. To cope with this, Nicola Hümpel and her Berlin theater team, Nico and the Navigators, take the most consistent new approach. They reinvent the magic opera, so to speak, by playing associatively around the core of the plot. In front of the semi-circular projection screen (stage: Oliver Proske), they add two performers to the singing personnel, who comment on the action pantomimically, occasionally acting as imaginary contact persons in the arias or simply playing corny jokes. In addition, there are the free-associative videos by Tom Hanke and the ironically stylized costumes by Frauke Ritter. All this gives the relationship chamber play a rather cheerfully restrained opulence. So the furious Roland doesn't have to be the belligerent, chivalrous hero at all. Here he is simply the sad little prince Orlando, who is also inside him.

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