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Met's 'Giulio Cesare' a confection of times, places, ideas

Prepare for an extended but potentially satisfying visit to the Nile with Caesar and Cleopatra looking Victorian, acting nothing like their Hollywood portrayals, but moving with Bollywood grace and, one hopes, sounding as agile as they are authoritative.

Natalie Dessay is Cleopatra in Handel's "Giulio Cesare" at the Metropolitan Opera. (Photo courtesy of Marty Sohl / Metropolitan Opera)
Natalie Dessay is Cleopatra in Handel's "Giulio Cesare" at the Metropolitan Opera. (Photo courtesy of Marty Sohl / Metropolitan Opera)Read moreMarty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

Prepare for an extended but potentially satisfying visit to the Nile with Caesar and Cleopatra looking Victorian, acting nothing like their Hollywood portrayals, but moving with Bollywood grace and, one hopes, sounding as agile as they are authoritative.

The Metropolitan Opera's season-ending simulcast (noon Saturday at six area movie theaters) is Handel's Giulio Cesare, an opera long considered among the composer's best, that made a star of Beverly Sills in the 1960s and that now reaches the mainstream opera public in a close-to-uncut form.

Musically, the key players here are Handel veterans - soprano Natalie Dessay, countertenor David Daniels, and conductor Harry Bicket - in a David McVicar production that's a confection (some might say collision) of times, places, and ideas. The assumption is that we don't need help following the story but can probe it more deeply through a variety of lenses.

The Romans conquer Egypt looking more like British imperialists. Suez comes to mind, though other eras are touched on in a rear-stage seascape diorama showing clipper ships and zeppelins. The formal artificiality of the opera's 18th-century dramaturgy becomes part of the story-telling: Politics is theater, particularly Cleopatra's seductive brand.

The surprise at the April 4 opening night is how well these elements blended, the Bollywood part being a semaphoric choreography that works surprisingly well with Handel's rhythm.

The revisionist view of Cleopatra is that she was probably more intelligent than sexy, which fits what soprano Dessay has to offer. Initially, her casting wasn't promising. The role's florid vocal demands are such that Sills wouldn't have dared sing it much past the middle stages of her vocal lifespan; Dessay, 48, is in the third (and so far, most haphazard) decade of her career. Yet on opening night, she seemed vocally reborn, singing with an authority and focus that has eluded her for years while acting the role with surprisingly wily humor.

Not so Daniels. Though in better shape than in some recent appearances, he was vocally underpowered, which can be addressed by simulcast microphones, though nothing can fill in the notes he skipped in his coloratura runs.

British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote (as Sesto) seems fundamentally incapable of being anything but fascinating; Patricia Barden (as the widow Cornelia) may have the opposite problem.

Director McVicar's strength is revealing character dynamics easily lost in a large opera house. so significant levels of theatricality may well be revealed by the HD cameras. That should help sustain the four-hour-plus running time. But so does Handel's long-term progression of key changes that keep your ear wondering what happens next.