Robert Carsen’s staging of Semele as a sort of modern-day British Royal Family scandal fresh from the pages of Hello! was first unveiled at Aix-en- Provence in 1996, and since then has paid its dues with several revivals. English National Opera’s 1999 revival conducted by Harry Bicket had a near-perfect cast including Rosemary Joshua, John Mark Ainsley, Susan Bickley and Sarah Connolly, and was broadcast on BBC television. It was a humorous yet generally sympathetic production, and, although the ENO Chorus bulged and sagged at times, the cast of singers knew how to deliver their words, understood how to act Handel’s characters and how to sing the music engagingly and eloquently. This DVD instead contains the 2007 Zürich revival built around Cecilia Bartoli. It is conducted by William Christie (who directed the production’s first run in 1996), but with little of his usual warmth and stylish sensibilities evident in this hard-driven, erratic and clumsy interpretation. Much of this is recklessly fast (as if to mask the deficiencies of some of the singing), peculiarly lacklustre or frustratingly interventionist (and sometimes all three things at once). Decca boldly proclaims on a cover sticker that this is Bartoli’s first Handel role on DVD, but this is nothing to get excited about. Her masquerading as something approximately resembling her character is dramatically implausible most of the time (a vicious “No, no, I’ll take no less” is an honourable exception), her recitatives are irritatingly mannered (the simple line “I seek to shun society” is enunciated with more misplaced exaggerations, and acted with less conviction, than I would have believed possible), and her unsteady machine-gun pinching of coloratura passages is difficult to enjoy (why can’t she keep her vowels in order during “Endless pleasure”?). Most of the rest of the cast is even worse. Charles Workman’s strident Jupiter comes off slightly better, and his pianissimo singing in the da capo of “Where’er you walk” is impressive (though Christie takes it far too slowly). Decca would have done better to licence the 1999 BBC broadcast and issue that on DVD rather than unleash the manifold horrors of this woeful performance upon sensitive Handelians. Avoid at all costs unless you’re a die-hard Bartoli worshipper.