The Cambridge Handel Opera Company (CHOC) is committed to performing Handel’s entire operatic legacy (as well as music by his contemporaries), and its latest production is Tamerlano (1724), a work signed off (although there were later revisions) after amazingly 20 days only in the making.
The successor to the Cambridge Handel Opera Group, the Cambridge Handel Opera Company aims to perform Handel’s operas in productions in which both music and staging are informed by the practices of Handel’s own day. The casts field upcoming performers alongside established singers, and the orchestra blends leading professionals with senior students from conservatoires across Britain and elsewhere. Four years after their inaugural production of Rodelinda in 2018, they returned to the stage of the Leys School with perhaps the least-known of the three operas (Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda) which Handel produced in the space of one remarkable year from February 1724.