Never let it be said that The Spectator fails to follow up an arts story. Long-term readers will recall that in the edition of 6 March 1711 Joseph Addison investigated the supply of live sparrows for the first production of Handel’s Rinaldo. ‘What, are they to be roasted?’ he asked, reasonably enough. No, they were ‘to enter towards the end of the first Act and to fly about the Stage’. Still, you need to keep an eye on these theatrical types and although there was certainly birdsong in the latest revival of Rinaldo – the end-of-term opera at the Royal Academy of Music – I can report it was recorded. No sparrows were cooked in the making of this opera.

Mind you, Handel purists took a bit of a battering. Trimmed to a lively two hours, Julia Burbach’s staging was full of playful effects. Those birds, for starters; plus rolls of the thunder-sheet and rattling batteries of percussion that I’m willing to bet you won’t find in any Urtext. The student orchestra under David Bates played mostly on modern instruments, with beefy, swaggering fanfares, whirling violins and some spectacular virtuoso peacocking from the woodwinds. Handel allegedly said that the English like something that hits them on the drum of the ear, and for once, that’s exactly what we got.

Why........

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