Shortly before the end of Handel’s opera “Radamisto,” the title character gives vent to his heartache in a slow, sumptuously beautiful aria about a storm-tossed ship. It’s a peculiar bit of text-setting — the music boasts no hint of tempestuous weather — but on Wednesday, April 20, at the opening of a four-performance run by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale, that one aria shone forth like a radiant beacon.

Iestyn Davies, the时尚的英国反演奏者他唱着拉达米斯托（Radamisto），用全身恩典的全部帮助来灌输咏叹调。他在滚滚短语中散发出长长的旋律，完美地调整了富有表现力的口才。那是一个令人兴奋的时刻。

It was also, unfortunately, the one high point in a long and dispiriting evening that otherwise gave evidence of how poorly Handel’s operatic music can register when treated without the requisite care and skill. The final offering of the organization’s 2021-22 season, and along-awaited landmark在指挥理查德·埃加尔（Richard Egarr）担任音乐总监的第一个完整赛季中，这个“ Radamisto”几乎在每个方面都令人失望。

The six-member cast was almost uniformly inadequate to the task of delivering the score accurately or alluringly. Director Christophe Gayral’s staging set the performers adrift in the vast empty spaces of Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall, giving them little of interest to do beyond adopting stock poses and wearing designer George Souglides’ vaguely updated military costumes.

在最好的情况下，宾的裸露墙壁是危险的，在最佳情况下，歌手的贡献弹起了回响的眩光，残酷地强调了他们的缺点。乐团挤在背景中，伴奏似乎是从相邻的房间里插入的。

Egarr was not even on hand to preside. He was ailing, and his stand-in, the young Macedonian-born harpsichordist and conductor David Belkovski, struggled through the three-hour performance to impart any dramatic energy to the score — or even to get many of the singers to pay the slightest attention to his downbeats. This was one of those evenings when the singer would often settle on one tempo, the conductor and the orchestra on another, and the audience was left to split the difference.

在汉德尔（Handel）的歌剧事业上的早期努力“ Radamisto”在任何情况下都是艰难的销售。这是一场武术，使两个帝国（亚美尼亚和特拉斯）及其各自的军队相互对抗。人际关系的各种彼此兴趣（亚美尼亚女王是色雷斯国王的女儿，也是Thracian Prince的姐姐），Lust and Tlynanny。

None of it quite adds up to a richly satisfying drama — certainly not in comparison with Handel’s later masterpieces — but it need not feel as stiff or emotionally inconsequential as it seemed on Wednesday. The risers of the hall’s playing space, which ascend and descend mechanically with the noise of a small seismic tremor, occasionally did interesting duty as the city walls of the besieged Thracian capital, but otherwise mostly afforded a setting for operatic parkour.

The one consistently stellar vocal performance came from the dynamic bass-baritone Aubrey Allicock, who brought tonal brilliance and dramatic fervor to the role of Tiridate, the villainous Armenian ruler. Davies, usually an artist of remarkable insight and power, sounded strangely out of sorts; the culminating aria aside, he was often uncertain of rhythm and pitch. The other singers — sopranos Liv Redpath and Ellie Laugharne, mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta and baritone Morgan Pearse — faced varying degrees of misfortune in their attempts to render the music with beauty or precision.

Handel’s operas, which some of us reckon among the great treasures of the musical canon, are becoming increasingly common in performance, but they still face skeptics who consider them dull or overly formal. Productions like this one don’t help the cause.

“Radamisto”:Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale. 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, April 22-23; 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 24. $37-$120. Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University. 650-724-2464.live.stanford.edu