Shoreditch Town Hall, London
An imaginative melding of a 1710 Handel cantata and a 1751 oratorio results in a nifty two-act opera-ballet – and a dazzling cornucopia of images

A pair of works by Handel written 40 years apart might have made awkward bedfellows, but director Thomas Guthrie’s fertile imagination ensured it was never a concern here. Staged in the Italianate surrounds of Shoreditch town hall, Tales of Apollo and Hercules was full of astute cross-references from one work to the other.

Guthrie and choreographer Valentino Zucchetti have wedded Handel’s 1710 Italian cantata Apollo e Dafne with the 1751 English oratorio The Choice of Hercules to create a nifty two-act opera-ballet, that singularly French baroque concoction that never really took off in England. Witty, at times slyly knowing, it juxtaposes the myth of Apollo’s rapacious pursuit of the nymph Daphne with a tug of war for the moral wellbeing of the boy Hercules. Five soloists, a clarion-voiced chorus of 15, six sinuous dancers from New English Ballet Theatre, a pair of black-clad puppeteers and the exuberant period forces of La Nuova Musica under David Bates did the rest.