The Handel festival opened in Halle on Friday with the brilliant premiere of Nicola Hümpel's “Orlando” What an odd hero! A narrow-chested fellow in a nondescript grey suit comes on stage wearing a ridiculous Cossack hat and carrying an empty suitcase. His facial features suggest simple-mindedness. OK, so he has fallen in love – but to what degree? His mentor, the wise magician Zoroastro, is not the only one to take issue with him: is this supposed to be Roland, the warrior? The most noble of Charlemagne's knights? Yet Handel, the astute musical magician and opera strategist, did in fact create just such a skewed Orlando figure, and he conceived the opera of the same name, first performed in 1733 during his London heyday, as a comedy built around this travesty of a hero, one blinded by love, whose excessive character causes him to work himself up into a jealous rage and, ultimately, into a state of delusion, of mania even. The renowned Farinelli, Handel's preferred castrato, was not amused. The same could not be said of the festival audience in Halle. The new artistic director Clemens Birnbaum entrusted the festival premiere to Nicola Hümpel, a cult director known on the independent theatre scene, who has already shaken up Berlin with "Nico and the Navigators". A risky choice? - A real find! For Nico cannot and will not identify with those grand exaltations associated with the baroque. She opts for a cool, ironic distance and keeps the characters, whether in delirium or in raptures, suspended from the strings of their emotions like mechanical puppets. The production is complemented by an understated stage design (Oliver Proske) laid out before a blue-green cyclorama, as well as unostentatious costumes (Frauke Ritter). The video sequences (Tom Hanke) have both an illustrative and commentarial role. The facial expressions and gestures of the actors correspond to their schematically dictated range of feelings. Hümpel certainly delivers a coup de maîtrise with the introduction of two of her Navigators, Miyoko Urayama and Patric Schott: they steer and undermine the action with their clever hullabaloo; the round dance of inflamed passions is performed in a manner akin to a street ballad. In this way anyone who goes off into ecstasies is presented as a fool. So it goes with Medoro, Orlando's rival for the favours of the lovely Angelica, and with the naïve shepherdess Dorinda. As soon as she begins to confess the agony of her longing in grand terms, the cheeky mimes unpick her bright red knitted stockings. In the meantime, Medoro, in a similar situation, takes matters in hand himself, in the form of an attack on his grotesque crocheted tie – an exposure of himself, in the literal sense, as the recompense for his shame. When Dorinda makes eyes at Medoro, it rains wads of cotton wool. And when the pastoral student of love is left standing as the only unfortunate in love at the production's end, she is deservedly sheepish. No over-excited sloppy sentimentality goes unpunished. A battle of voices at the highest level Even if back then such a baseness bordering on the quite absurdly spiteful was unimaginable, by today's standards it is the perfect interpretation of what Handel had in mind. Members of the aristocratic audience were not necessarily supposed to identify with these heroic play-actors against their will, but rather to revel in their singing. And what Halle's soloists had to offer musically was a real joy. It is a rare thing to have the opportunity to experience such a first-rate and well-balanced ensemble. Local hero Christoph Stegemann captivates as Zoroastro with his stable, clearly contoured bass. Only at times did Marie Friederike Schöder, a Mozart specialist, have a hint of trouble with Angelica's airy coloratura, whereas Sophie Klußmann fulfilled all of the promise of innocently arcadian sweetness. All three are part of the Halle Opera ensemble. The duel between Owen Willetts as Orlando, and Dmitry Egorov as Medoro, two wonderfully fruity diverging altos, ended with a draw at the very highest level. Director of music Bernhard Forck conducted the festival orchestra, which played upon authentic instruments with great relish and assurance, as well as real poise and a professional feel for delicate emphasis as well as dramatic urgency. The result was a nicely taut, crisp Handel sound. The audience took delight in what was a highly artificial, heartily humorous performance, both musically and on stage. This "Orlando furioso" did not attract the usual applause at the end of the performance. It came as a veritable storm.

In Halle, Orlando, who has been given an opera by many composers, is not so much a raging Roland, an Orlando furioso, as in Vivaldi's work, for example. In the festival production, he is rather a little prince who loses himself and his mind. Which is no wonder in the confusion of who-loves-who and especially who-loves-not. Georg Friedrich Händel, born in Halle, also made use of the Orlando furioso material, which goes back to Ludovico Ariosto's epic. In 1733, Handel even used a libretto that Domenico Scarlatti had already set to music 20 years before him. Handel relies less on dramatic action peppered with bravura arias than on the melodious emotional states of the lovers, the disappointed, and those who have despaired to the point of madness (Orlando himself can only be brought back from madness by a rather drastic intervention that resurrects all the dead and magically straightens everything out). The arioso verbosity becomes a template for the singers' virtuosity. Handel had written the title role for his castrato star Senesiono, after all. Halle's Handel Festival can boast two excellent countertenors in Owen Willetts as Orlando and Dmitry Egorov as his rival Medoro. Marie Friederike Schöder finds dramatic verve as Angelica, and Christoph Stegemann also contributes a rock-solid magician Zoroastro as the leader. Only Sophie Klußmann, in her Dorinda, was still too clearly alienated from the challenges of baroque singing. Once again the Händelfestspielorchester proved its rank as a special ensemble with an internationally competitive level. The part of the Staatskapelle Halle playing on period instruments, under the baton of its new director Bernhard Forck, a specialist in early music, was in true festival form. Magic opera reinvented New (and overdue) for Halle was a scenic daring. After a trial run the year before, Nicola Hümpel and her Berlin off-theater team staged "Nico and the Navigators," the Festival's main production, which, in keeping with tradition, the Halle Opera House contributes. Hümpel reinvents the magic opera, so to speak, by playing associatively around the core of the plot on various levels. In front of the semicircular projection screen (stage: Oliver Proske), she adds two performers, Miyoko Urayama and Patric Schott, to the singing personnel. They comment on the action pantomimically, occasionally acting as imaginary contact persons in the arias or playing practical jokes. In addition, there are the freely associating videos by Tom Hanke and the costumes by Frauke Ritter, inspired by Robert Wilson's productions. All this gives the relationship chamber play a cheerfully restrained opulence. Orlando doesn't have to be the belligerent hero. Here he is simply the sad little prince that is also inside him.