First performed in London in 1715 during the inaugural season of George I’s reign, Handel’s fifth opera, Amadigi di Gaula, is a dazzling tale of love, jealousy and enchantment centred on a sorceress, Melissa, consumed by her love for the knight Amadigi, who in turn loves another.

Elizabeth Quinn caught up with Pinchgut Opera’s Erin Helyard, who is about to make his conducting debut in the UK, leading The English Concert in a Buxton International Festival production of Amadigi di Gaula featuring the American countertenor Jake Ingbar and sopranos Rowan Pierce and Hilary Cronin.

Erin Helyard. Photo © Robert Catto

Erin, what draws you to one opera or performance over another?

Usually it begins with a sense that the piece has something urgent to say in the theatre.

I’m drawn to works in which music and drama are inseparable – where the score doesn’t merely accompany the action, but generates it. That can mean a distinctive dramatic architecture, an unusually vivid emotional world, or a musical language that feels genuinely individual. I’m especially interested in works that reward close listening: pieces whose rhetoric, pacing, and expressive detail reveal more and more the deeper...