Glass/Handel at Printworks — a bizarre and touching immersive experience

A typical Printworks event possesses the tranquillity and decorum of a budget airline check-in desk. When the newspaper presses fell silent, this cavernous space reinvented itself as London’s premier rave destination; with redevelopment looming, a Prom with English National Opera proved appropriately pensive.

Interweaving Handel and Philip Glass arias with video installations, haute couture and beatboxing, the “immersive experience” of Glass/Handel, led by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, deployed its varied resources to bizarre and touching effect. The baroque lament of “Lascia ch’io panga” from Handel’s Rinaldo echoed over exposed concrete; projected above the audience, leather-harnessed waifs turned on a wheel like doleful rotisserie chickens. Even when its relentless edginess threatened to overshadow the music, ENO’s maxi-minimalist spectacle underscored a classic operatic theme: the transience of human excess.

Polite applause as conductor Karen Kamensek took the stage marked the first and last nod to Proms convention, broken by a burst of metallic gurgling. Having collaborated on ENO’s 2015 production of Glass’s Akhnaten and a Grammy-winning recording with the Met, Costanzo and Kamensek came prepared to maintain tight musical control, while their audience grew increasingly disoriented. As the gurgles gave way to the crisp, stately strains of Handel’s Tolomeo, Costanzo presented himself, in the flesh and on film, as a conduit between worlds. Drawing on the repetitive, rigid structures common to Handel’s baroque forms and Glass’s minimalism, the programme deployed grand forces to an introspective end, with Costanzo appearing as both fashion designer Raf Simons’s clotheshorse and medieval knight in the timeless spirit of celebrity.

Costanzo’s steady, ethereal countertenor hung over three stages and a multilevel auditorium. Justin Peck’s choreography was overshadowed by video installations, which veered from Tilda Swinton’s spaniels romping on a beach to a CGI hot dog blooming from a crotch. “Nature beatboxer” Jason Singh was strategically deployed to break the lull of Glass’s pulsating soundscapes, equally hypnotic in 1988’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and in a premiere of “No More, You Petty Spirits”. Gliding around the floor, Costanzo parted the throng with the demeanour of a monarch visiting the lower orders. Whether drawn by the song, the haute couture or the tractor-beam light rods wielded by Costanzo’s acolytes, linen-trousered elders and edgy young art-school types drifted after him in silent fascination.

Processing through its roster of fallen heroes, from Handel’s Amadigi to Glass’s settings of Cymbeline, Glass/Handel conveyed both the technical luxury and the crushing, confusing dislocation of grand pageant. Artist Glenn Brown, painting in silhouette, eventually produced an image of a man in an ostrich-plumed helmet. Perhaps it was a condolence that this recalled an icon of Handel’s time: a celebrity castrato named Marchesi, who stipulated that regardless of the opera, his first appearance on stage had to involve a helmet topped with six-foot-tall plumage and the words “Where am I?” A similar spirit of bombastic chaos governed Costanzo’s take on the Proms, with space, music and art bleeding into each other in baffling yet appropriate fashion.

★★★★☆

bbc.co.uk/proms