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Handel’s Giulio Cesare in a staged concert performance at the Barbican, given under the experienced baton of René Jacobs, was something to look forward to keenly, especially for that tiny minority of us who think the work a great one but the enormously popular Glyndebourne production a vulgar travesty. In the event, it was rather a flat evening. Perhaps if one way of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbican Centre were to be the introduction of effective air-conditioning into the stifling atmosphere of the Hall, such huge events (this was another almost four-and-a-half-hour marathon) wouldn’t seem so interminable. Perhaps, too, the extreme frequency with which Handel operas are being performed in London at present, with five in the past few weeks, contributes to the feeling I have that they possess less individuality than the pundits claim for them. Whether it’s Alexander the Great in India, or Nero and his mother in Rome, or figures from medieval romances in never-never land, or Caesar and Cleopatra in Egypt, what the subject-matter really is, and obviously, is power, love and betrayal, political and erotic.