Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is the opposite of a jukebox musical. So fertile, so overflowing was the 22-year-old Handel’s musical imagination, that his very first oratorio, composed during his time in Rome, would become a chest full of music the composer returned to again and again, pilfering and self-plagiarising over the ensuing decades. All those hits from Rodelinda, from Agrippina, Partenope, Rinaldo: he wrote them here first.

Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes to wed his widow and bring a kind of peace to the conquered land.

This Palm Sunday served up an epiphany. Previous encounters with Handel's Messiah, in whatever version, and whether listening or performing, turned out to have been through a glass darkly. And here we were face to face with undiluted genius, served with total consistency by 26 musicians running the gamut from intimacy through fury to great blazes, all guided by the extraordinary spirit of IBO artistic director Peter Whelan.

When your special guest is a young soprano with all the world before her, the total artist already, your programme might seem to run itself. Yet the Dunedin Consort’s sequence seen and heard in Glasgow, Edinburgh and (last night) London followed a proper musical logic, running together an overture, a ballet and a cantata in the first half, and pulling focus on Handel’s early years in Rome, all supremely inventive music – though the later G minor Concerto Grosso which launched the second half is in a class of its own.

Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4^th-century Rome. It’s a red rag to directors, and there’s a relief to seeing the oratorio in the concert hall, where the composer is cut free from a lot of acrobatic conceptual wriggling. And really, when it sounds like this, you need nothing more.

Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival,  an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the composer’s early cantatas about thwarted love and mined them for all their incandescent rage and poisoned wistfulness.

Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.

English Touring Opera opened its spring season with Handel's Giulio Cesare – not a new production, but in a new guise. Typically for Baroque opera, the version of the work premiered in 1724 was very long. ETO previously took up the challenge by staging it in full over two nights. They then cut it down to a more manageable three hours (including interval), but that tour was interrupted by Covid, so now it's back for a full run.

A dream pairing of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and early-keyboard wizard Kristian Bezuidenhout marked St Cecilia’s Day at the Wigmore Hall with a programme that celebrated music made not in the Black Forest but beside the Thames.

Handel’s audiences must have taken a very long time to settle – at least an act, to judge from the mostly inconsequential music of Alcina’s first hour. Lovely: we’re on an enchanted isle where puritanical people have been transformed into animal-headed courtiers, and a love-imbroglio merits only a “so what?” Richard Jones and his singers keep it lively and focused, but the bounce needed from Christian Curnyn and the Royal Opera House Orchestra doesn’t come.