We’ll have no long faces about here, if you please. We know perfectly well that we mustn’t believe a note of it and that Handel would be turning in his grave. But it’s a long time ago now: the playing isn’t half as un-Handelian as it might have been, there’s some good singing, and of course there’s Christoff. He had sung the role previously at Rome in 1955, but the prompter is taking no chances and the sinister urgency of his stage-whisper intensifies every time the great bass appears. The ones to listen for, however, are the lovely Marimpietri, the sumptuous Dominguez and the Ptolemy, Massimiliano Malaspina (not a countertenor!).'