Being Both was the title of Alice Coote’s performance at this summer’s Brighton festival, where she explored the gender-bending arias of Handel’s operas and oratorios in a kind of one-woman show, with the help of stage director Susannah Waters, conductor Harry Bicket and the English Concert. It was adapted for this late-night Prom, but the premise remained elusive.
Handel’s most heroic male roles were written for female or castrato voices, and Coote has made a specialism of them. Here she wove arias for macho heroes Ariodante and Ruggiero together with ones for strong women – Dejanira, Theodora, Cleopatra – into a kind of meditation on gender. But it was a very loose weave.
What was she trying to say? Xs and Ys drifted slowly in projections at the back as Coote attempted to tot up her chromosomes. Dressed in anonymous black, prowling spotlit around three white boxes, she returned time and again to the same gesture, making a triangle with her fingers in front of her crotch. The confusion that each of her characters clearly felt about what might lie within that triangle seemed to override any of the concerns specifically expressed in their arias.
Dejanira’s Resign Thy Club had her miming an aeroplane on the word “fly”, and stroking an imaginary beard. He Was Despised from Messiah was sung sitting inside one of the boxes as if it were a bath, as a distraught-looking Coote smeared some white stuff on her face and made a cursory attempt to shave that beard off.
Duetting with cellist Joseph Crouch in the final number, Dejanira’s There, in Myrtle Shades from Hercules, she at last seemed content to sing in long lines. Elsewhere we had characteristic flashes of brilliance couched in fussy, overemphatic delivery that made her upper and lower ranges seem disjointed, and often rendered her faster passages inaudible. Coote is a compelling performer, and just about brought it all off, but this recital had some pressing identity questions of its own.
• On BBC iPlayer until 3 October. The Proms continue until 12 September.
