Don’t judge this DVD by its cover! That might give you a more favourable impression than it deserves. The booklet essays claiming to be about performance practice of Handel operas in the 21st century are risible: the use of organ and occasional recorders doubling violins are common enough aberrations, but re-ordering important musical numbers to nonsensical contexts and the insertion of utterly incongruous numbers from Handel’s later London operas are tantamount to performance malpractice. Worse still, the transposition of all the major castrato roles for baritones and tenors destroys the fabric of Handel’s contrapuntal writing and melodic rhetoric. It has taken nearly a century for Handel’s opera scores to be taken seriously on their own terms as great music dramas of charm and astute emotional penetration, but this professedly radical staging is in reality a throwback to the bad old days. Despite decent stylish playing, generally assured singing and some undeniably clever stagecraft, Eva Buchmann’s laboured conceptual production is tiresome and oppressed by its cliche-ridden desire to abandon the shackles of convention. It is difficult to perceive from this unenlightened and insensitive treatment of Handel’s great Venetian opera how DVDs like this ought to be the future of opera dissemination. Perhaps CD recordings of concert performances are not such bad things after all.