You could have built a tent city from all the red chinos: Aci by the River reviewed

The Thames cruise for which Handel composed his Water Music in 1717 famously went on until around 4 a.m. The boat trip downstream that formed part of the London Handel Festival’s Aci by the River was a bit zippier. We piled onto a chartered Thames Clipper at Westminster Pier, and a quartet of wind players were already huddled in the gangway, playing suitably aquatic Handel favourites. A bassoonist gave an anxious grimace as the captain floored the throttle and the boat lurched forward.

If our craft had been wrecked on some enchanted isle, we could have built a tent city from the red chinos

You do get to see an older, more Hogarthian city from the river, even if the skies were London-drab rather than the hoped-for Canaletto blue. One rationale for interactive music events is to attract that elusive younger, funkier audience, but this looked very much like the standard opera crowd to me. If, in authentic baroque style, our craft had been beset by vengeful water gods and wrecked on some enchanted isle unknown to the Port of London Authority, we could have built a tent city from all the red chinos.

Anyway: a pirouette in the river opposite the Millennium Dome and we tied up at Trinity Buoy Wharf to a fanfare of valveless trumpets. The venue was a converted warehouse where an independent production company, Cyclops Pictures, was apparently filming a site-specific, Sky Arts-y updating of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, and the director, Paolo Polifemo, was already brooding over his production desk in sunglasses, looking every bit your basic arts-sector nightmare. Runners fiddled with cameras and lights, and singers wandered in with a wave (‘Hi Laurence!’) to the conductor, Laurence Cummings, and the period instrument orchestra, gathered in the corner.