Riccardo Primo at the London Handel Festival

Riccardo Primo - Britten Theatre, 26 March 2012 (London Handel Festival)

The London Handel Festival dug deep into the leftovers bin for their annual staged opera this year. 

It's fair to say Riccardo Primo isn't an inexplicably overlooked masterpiece, but it's better than its obscurity might suggest - and like any Handel rarity, worth hearing at least once.

Unfortunately it wasn't done any favours by a production which exposed and often exacerbated the dramatic weaknesses that bar its wider currency. In compensation, musical justice was done to the lively, imaginative score by Laurence Cummings and the London Handel Orchestra, together with some talented advanced-level singing students from the Royal College of Music.