Hugely entertaining: Royal Opera’s Alcina reviewed

A hotel bellboy, the story goes, discovered George Best in a luxury suite surrounded by scantily clad lovelies and empty champagne bottles. ‘George, George’, he sighed. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’. It’s the same deal, essentially, with Ruggiero, hero of Handel’s Alcina. As the curtain rises he’s in the boudoir of Alcina, a smokin’ hot love-witch who lives on a paradise island with her minxy little sister, Morgana, and whose only serious failing – and who are we, really, to judge? – is a fondness for transforming her enemies into animals. This being an epic tale of chivalry, and this being 1735, it’s universally understood that having this much fun simply isn’t on. Whether he likes it or not, Ruggiero is to be restored to his virtuous and (in this staging, for some reason) tam o’shanter-wearing wife, Bradamante.

There’s your basic dramatic problem: solve for a 21st-century audience. Is Handel playing a crafty double-game here – titillating while he moralises; using conventional pieties as a licence to play, very knowingly, upon his public’s animal instincts? It hardly matters because in this hugely entertaining new production from director Richard Jones it’s sexy time all the way. The forces of virtue are Bible-thumping puritans (literally – they wear stovepipe hats). Boo, hiss! Alcina (Lisette Oropesa), meanwhile, sashays about in Louboutins and a strappy little black number, flashing devilish grins at the audience. Morgana (Mary Bevan) is a Dr Martens-wearing redhead in a see-through dress.

Jones has been through a duff patch recently, culminating in a car-crash Valkyrie late last year. Maybe there’s something in Alcina’s magic after all, because he seems to have regained his mojo. This is a blast: quirky but never outright silly, full of playful little touches (Morgana and Oronte rutting in a potting shed like teenagers on heat; a giant spaniel casually chewing on Alcina’s designer shoes) and delightful to look at. Antony McDonald’s designs have jewel-like colours glowing out of velvety darkness. Ruched satin drapes flush silver, gold and rose, and enormous bonsai roll on and off stage in homage to the sliding flats of 18th- century operatic scenery. From outsize animal heads to the (often omitted) boy-treble role of Oberto, Jones and his team go all out to press the audience’s ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ buttons, and if you’re wise, you’ll let yourself be charmed.

You might have read about the ugly incident when the treble Malakai M. Bayoh was barracked by an idiot in the audience. In this second performance the role was taken by Rafael Flutter (the two boys are alternating), who sang sweetly and with an ice-cool head for Handel’s dizzying coloratura. Bevan tingled with ardour, Varduhi Abrahamyan projected a touching earnestness as Bradamante, and Emily D’Angelo, as Ruggiero – originally a castrato role – sang with a core of cool, glinting steel. Under Christian Curnyn the ROH orchestra was transformed, fizzing and swirling in a buff, buoyant version of period style that wasn’t afraid to flaunt its curves. Above it all shimmered the enchantress herself: Oropesa, sounding as lyrical, as luminous and (when her spells fade) as heartbreaking as you might have hoped if you heard her in La Traviata last season. Jones gives her a (wholly inauthentic) happy ending, and who can blame him?

The Wigmore Hall hosted another heart-stopping soprano singing against type. I knew the French soprano Sabine Devieilhe principally from period-instrument recordings of 18th-century repertoire. Here she sang Mozart, but also lieder by Berg, Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss, and with unshowy support from the pianist Mathieu Pordoy she made them sound dewy-fresh. Her voice picked up and outlined each word; long lines sounded spontaneous but wholly considered. The clarity and the lightly worn self-awareness of Devieilhe’s singing made for a seductive combination, and never more so than when, as an encore, she sang one of Mozart’s rare French-language songs and her voice slipped like watered silk over each detail and corner of the words.

In Birmingham, at the opposite extreme of scale, they showed the 1948 John Mills movie Scott of the Antarctic complete with Vaughan Williams’s orchestral score played live by the CBSO plus girls’ chorus, solo soprano (Katie Trethewey), organ, you name it. This is VW in Technicolor, hallucinatory in its weirdness and fantasy. A cor anglais wandered amid squalls of xylophone and piano; string threnodies marched grimly onwards under a howling wind-machine. Martyn Brabbins conducted with staggering precision. He never dialled the music down (fortunately the dialogue had sub-titles), and while the ear gradually assimilated the quieter sequences as if they were on the soundtrack, the raw attack of the big climaxes shook the air (and the emotions) in a way that was unlike anything you’ll experience in a cinema. At those moments the film felt almost too small for the music. It needs an IMAX, really.