Our former spear-carrier for the Handel Opera Society is in a unique position to observe that it's high time his operas were performed here.
 Photo: NBR NZ Opera General Director Aidan Lang

We take it as a given that Handel is now regularly performed in opera houses around the world, but this was certainly not the case 30 years ago. The pioneering work of the Handel Opera Society, and the two German Handel festivals in Gottingen and his birthplace Halle, was indispensable in bringing attention to the operas of a composer who was otherwise exclusively known as a writer of oratorio, plus a couple of well-known orchestral suites. That the Handel Opera Society would lose its government funding within a couple of years of employing me was hopefully not down to my stage-management skills - nor indeed to my occasional cameo performances as assorted servants, bodyguards or, on one bizarre occasion, half of the Greek army! Having carried the Handelian flame almost single-handedly for so long, it is slightly ironic that the company didn't move with the times and respond to the extraordinary sea changes that took place in the early '80s, and which would forever change the way that Handel's operas would be presented: namely, the emergence of new styles of operatic production and the advent of "period" practice in music of the baroque era.

With the benefits of hindsight, the fairest adjective to be applied to the Handel Opera Society's productions is "worthy". Often inspired in their presentational style by etchings of the original performances, the taste was for historical authenticity. Forgetting perhaps that a drawing is inevitably the stylised capture of a single moment of a theatrical perfrormance and not a living archive, the general method required the performer to sing an entire section of an aria in one static position, and then stride with great purpose (but little or no dramatic intent) to a different spot on the stage during the ritornelli - the short orchestral passages linking two sung sections - before launching off again.

Sometimes, this reliance on contemporary visual reference also applied itself to the costuming. This usually consisted of the singers donning plumed headgear with a naive colour coding, according to character type: the innocent soprano in white, the villain in black, and red reserved for the slightly racy or morally dangerous mezzo-soprano. And when productions were not trying to be "authentic", they would go in the opposite direction, filled to the brim with naturalistic stage "business" which sat completely at odds with the resolutely non-naturalistic idiom of baroque opera. So therein lay the problem: how to find a theatrical style that was appropriate to the works themselves, and yet spoke to a modern audience. Enter stage left that sometime hero, sometime villain, the contemporary opera director.

The hallmark of a "modern" opera production is not whether it is in modern dress or not - a common red herring - but whether it attempts to find a new and suitable theatricality for the work in question, which in turn allows its inner meaning to be read alongside its basic narrative. This often results in a move away from the straitjacket of naturalism that so dominates our theatre today - and let's remember that the overwhelming majority of the core operatic repertoire was written before the concept of naturalism had even been conceived. So Handel is a perfect candidate for revisionalism, and in recent years we have seen a string of truly outstanding produtions, which have revealed his operas to have a keen sense of dramatic pacing and a profound and truthful understanding of human behaviour in all its shades and colours. In other words, Handel has been shown to be a real dramatist and a truly great composer of opera and not just a quaint historical curiosity.

Working in tandem with this new theatricality has been the rapid growth of period practice in the way in which baroque works are now played. Research into baroque style, coupled with the reconstructions of period instruments, has created sound worlds for Handel's music that are completely different from those I experienced when I stood poised in the wings, spear in hand, ready to risk my all. I have been asked why The NBR New Zealand Opera has gone to the trouble of bringing a period orchestra to New Zealand to play for Xerxes - the acclaimed Lautten Compagney.

The short answer is that now I simply cannot conceive of Handel's music being played on modern instruments. My memory of the orchestral sound back in the 1980s was that it was genteel. Yes, the musical phrasing was stylistically correct, but the unfortunate players, armed with powerful modern violins, were continually having to hold back, trying their best to prevent the music from sounding like Brahms. Put a violin strung with gut into the hands of specialist baroque players, however, and you have a completely different beast. The music is liberated. The fast-moving passages - and there are many in Handel - dance with a savage intensity, which rivals the virtuosity Handel demands of his singers. It's rough-edged, visceral and thrilling.

Xerxes is witty, lyrical, moving and at times explores the human condition with acute perception. For Handel opera "newbies", it is a perfect introduction to his genius. You are in for a treat.

Aidan Lang, General Director