Handel’s accession to the mainstream of today’s operatic repertoire has been a phenomenon of the 23 years since the tricentenary, in 1985, of his birth. Nothing confirms the composer’s “arrival” as one of the essential creators of opera than Placido Domingo’s belated debut in a Handel role. The veteran Spanish tenor celebrated his 67th birthday in January, yet he shows no sign of letting up: a new album of his favourite Spanish songs is about to be released, he is artistic director of two leading American opera companies, and in addition to tackling new roles, he conducts many of the operas he used to sing in. When most singers might be accepting the inevitability of the r-word, he refuses to stand still.

The defeated Ottoman ruler, Bajazet, in Handel’s Tamerlano brings Domingo’s tally of roles to an astonishing 126. It is a surprising choice, since baroque works have not loomed large in his repertoire. On the other hand, less disbelief needs to be suspended when he plays a Lear-like father figure than when he’s singing Iphigénie’s little brother, Oreste, opposite a soprano 20 years his junior.

Domingo has just presented his first Bajazet to audiences at the Teatro Real in his native Madrid; he plans further performances later this season in Washington; and in 2010, the Madrid production comes to Covent Garden to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his debut there. By that time, he will be almost 70, but his voice sounds in such good shape now that the portents are good, even if his stylistic approach will not please Hande-lian purists and period-obsessed hair shirts. With more performances under his belt, he might avoid the couple of embarrassing memory lapses that marred his performance on Monday night.

Tamerlano is a long opera. In Madrid, with minimal cuts, the performance lasted four and a half hours – and the conductor, Paul McCreesh, a genuine stylist, is no slouch in matters of tempo. Bajazet not only has six da capo arias (numbers in which the initial melody is repeated after a central section, with vocal decoration), but acres of dialogue. Here Domingo, with his superb diction, his great declamatory power and eloquent phrasing, made rich amends for losing his way around his first and last arias. He portrays the proud, implacable Ottoman as an older relation of his famous Otello, a mortally wounded noble lion, a victim of his own vanity and rage. Even if some of his vocal mannerisms sound stylistically alien to this great music, Domingo still brings a towering presence and bags of vocal charisma to Bajazet.

He has the good fortune to be working with a director, Graham Vick, and designer, Richard Hudson, who pay Handel the considerable compliment of taking him seriously as a dramatist. This is surely one of Vick’s finest achievements in the opera house, and it looks stunning with its glistening white, two-level, arena-like set, setting the characters and Hudson’s extravagant Baroque-Islamic costumes into brilliant relief. The arrival of the princess Irene (the lovely Croatian mezzo Renata Pokupic) on a life-size blue and gold elephant is a coup de théâtre, and the central image of a huge leg bestriding a globe is a powerful symbol of Handel’s great game of potentates locked in mortal enmity.

Despite Domingo’s star persona, two younger singers triumphed in the castrato parts of Tamerlano and his ally Andronico: the Swedish mezzo Ann Hallenberg and Irish contralto Patricia Bardon could probably alternate in these parts, but Hallenberg lent the Mogul tyrant a strutting peacock arrogance bordering on psychosis, while Bardon touched the heart with her expressive singing and the conviction of the gestural rhetoric that makes Vick’s direction of the singers so compelling.

English National Opera is playing away from the Coliseum this month, performing small-scale contemporary music-theatre at the Young Vic while visiting dance companies take centre stage at the heart of the West End. Whether this innovation respects the spirit of David Mellor’s gift of the theatre to the company when he was arts minister under Marga-ret Thatcher is debatable: he spent more than £12m of taxpayers’ money to establish a permanent home for London’s second opera company, not to provide it with a rental investment. And I’m afraid I can’t muster much enthusiasm for the opening show, Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek’s Lost Highway, based on David Lynch’s cult film of parallel lives, swapped personalities and morbid sexual fantasies.

Neuwirth’s generic-modernist score rarely rises above the level of a background commentary to a predominantly spoken play. The director, Diane Paulus, and designer, Riccardo Hernandez, make brilliant use of the space with a fibreglass room suspended above a highway like central acting area. It’s baffling that the actors/singers and orchestra need amplification in such an intimate arena, but there are powerful performances from Mark Bonnar as the jazz-trumpeter Fred, who may or may not have murdered his wife, and the dashing young baritone Quirijn de Lang as the car mechanic Pete, who mysteriously replaces him on Death Row. David Moss’s Ernest Borgnine-like Mr Eddy is a tour de force of cameo acting and singing, and Christopher Robson looks and sounds appropriately weird as the voyeuristic Mystery Man who videos Fred’s and Pete’s sexual antics, while suggesting a spooky éminence grise controlling the dream-like action.

Visit timesonline.co.uk/music for other reviews by Hugh Canning

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