Handel’s Scipione: the Early Opera Company close the London Handel Festival with a celebration of clemency

This year’s London Handel Festival was brought to a gracious close with a celebration of clemency, magnanimity and honour.  Scipione, the ninth of the operas that Handel composed for the…

Blow’s Venus and Adonis: the Early Opera Company at St John’s Smith Square

Probably first performed at the London or Windsor court in 1683, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis is a thinly veiled political satire on the amorous appetites of Charles II and…