David Hansen hits the highs with soapsuds and fluffy towels.

Cavalli’s operatic take on the theft of the Golden Fleece was once the most popular work on the musical stages of Europe. It’s taken 400 years for it to make its way to our fair shores, but to judge from Pinchgut Opera’s feel-good frolic, in a simple but effective staging by Chas Rader-Shieber, it’s been well worth the wait.

Cavalli inherited the musical mantle of Monteverdi, but he avoided the Neo-Platonic moralising of the earlier Italian operatic works and followed the public taste for fun, spectacle and, yes you’ve guessed it, sex.

A crack band of 13 (drawn from a beautifully enthusiastic Orchestra of the Antipodes) are lead by the magnetic Erin Helyard, whose graceful ducking and weaving provides an evening’s entertainment all of its own. Helyard doesn’t put a foot wrong all night and his sense of communion with orchestra and singers it total.

Taking the lead role of the ambiguously semi-heroic Jason is the charismatic David Hansen, one of today’s leading countertenors and on this showing a very classy act indeed. His first entry in the bathtub, with naught but a strategically placed soapsud to conceal his modesty, is...