As if Handel didn't write enough genuine operas, companies keep unveiling forgotten stage works disguised as such. Handel wrote his score for Alceste in 1750 as incidental music to a play by Tobias Smollett; there was so much music the play was mistakenly referred to by some as an opera. It went into rehearsal at Covent Garden but, probably due to a row between Smollett and the management, the project was pulled before it reached the stage.
Handel's score survives but Smollett's text is lost, so to perform the work the English Bach Festival have had to turn it into a kind of masque. The parts of the story that would have been declaimed by actors are presented in mime instead, and other Handel operas have been plundered to provide music for the extended ballet sequences. The resulting work, premiered 11 years ago but now brought "home" to WC2 for the first time, is a paradox: an attempt to recreate in a slavishly authentic manner a work that was never conceived in this format in the first place.
The English Bach Festival came into being nearly 50 years ago pledging to present operas of this period "as authentically as historical research will allow". It is valid to have these traditions preserved but, in sticking to inflexible rules, the company risks having the audience catch a whiff of formaldehyde. The baroque gestures and dance movements employed with great sincerity throughout Alceste (in Tom Hawkes's direction and Sarah Cremer's choreography) can't help but look awkward to a 21st-century audience. Although lovingly recreated by Terence Emery, the costumes - tall feathered headdresses for the men, crinolines drawn up like Austrian blinds to display the women's feet - also provoked giggles rather than gasps.
Musically, things were better, the small orchestra sounding neat and poised even in the Linbury's uncharitable acoustic. Conductor Lawrence Cummings shaped phrases energetically while driving the musicians along from the harpsichord.
The singing was rather mixed, but Yvonne Barclay charmed the audience with her soft tone in Gentle Mor pheus, and Graeme Broadbent made a solid, resonant Charon. The dancer Elizabeth Lea communicated Alceste's own story gracefully, while Roger Frith's lighting brought imagination to the stage. But the action he had to illuminate was earnestly unexciting - all posturing and no attitude.
The EBF may once have had a reputation for innovation, but this Alceste can only be described as a museum piece.
Further performances tonight and tomorrow. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
