A rare chance to hear one of Handel's greatest operas in Jonathan Miller's production for the City of London Festival, live from Sadler's Wells. Handel wrote "Tamerlano" at the peak of his powers in 1724 and filled it with music of vivid drama and searing beauty. Love, hatred and revenge stalk the corridors of power in the brooding atmosphere of the 15th-century Ottoman court where the tyrannical Emperor Tamerlano holds prisoner the defeated Turkish Sultan Bajazet and his daughter Asteria. Tamerlano schemes to renounce his betrothed Irene and marry Asteria instead. But his confidant, Andronico, also loves Asteria and sets out to win her himself.
English Concert, conductor Trevor Pinnock Parti
8.30 Twenty Minutes
Jonathan Miller, director of this production of Handel's "Tamerlano", talks about the formality of the opera and the intensity of the emotional range conveyed in the music. He discusses how he has tried to convey this intensity by the restrained and stylised gestures of his actors, and how the passion for Orientalism in the 18th century makes the opera, then as now, "something from elsewhere and from elsewhen".
8.50 Part 2