This is a reissue of a successful recording from the Brilliant Classics catalogue of the Cantata Apollo e Dafne, as well as the instrumental Suite from the Alchemist.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The Concerto Copenhagen is Scandinavia’s most renowned Baroque ensemble and one of the most innovative such formations worldwide. Its trademarks are its unusual program combinations featuring Scandinavian rarities and famous Baroque masterpieces. This world-class orchestra now turns to Handel’s great Brockes-Passion in a recording based on the Halle edition of this composer’s works. The Passion text published by the well-to-do Hamburg resident Barthold Heinrich Brockes was a literary bestseller during the early eighteenth century. Composers set his poetic text, the first to add narrative elements to the Biblical Passion texts, more than thirty times. Today the best-known of these compositions is the one by George Frideric Handel, who set these verses to music in 1716, creating what would remain his only sacred work in German. Stylistically, however, the Brockes-Passion prefers to follow Italian models and speaks a musical language resembling that of the Baroque opera. Following concerts with this program, Die Welt enthusiastically summed up the result: “Mortensen’s elite forces from the original sound movement instinctively realize what their master and motivator wishes… One of the best early music ensembles paints a Baroque picture that richly displays magnificent color, suggests mystery, and repeatedly also is animated by dance. The method employed by Mortensen while modeling the music enables him to breathe new life into one of the most significant Passion oratorios composed prior to the later masterpieces by Bach.”

Roland Wilson enjoys great esteem as a trumpeter and a cornett player who performs with his own ensemble, and as a musicologist his name stands for the rediscovery of many an early music rarity. On our new recording we hear two highly interesting works that once were (and today still are) ascribed to George Frideric Handel. Johann Mattheson, who was working on the setting of the same libretto in 1723, wrote a detailed review of this Passion probably first performed in 1704 and published anonymously. Although Mattheson does not mention the “world-famous” man by name, his choice of words repeatedly offers clear references, for example, when he states that the inscription Pilate had put on the cross caused him “new business” (“neue Händel”). Mattheson doubtless knew exactly who the composer was, and everything that he describes is a perfect match for Handel. For me, there is a lot in the score that recalls the mature Handel while sounding very much like a young man who was then in quest of his individual style. The same applies to the chorale cantata “Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder,” a work certainly suggesting an even earlier date of composition. This new recording by the early music specialists of Musica Fiata and an ensemble of soloists brings this wonderful music to life with fantastic tonal homogeneity and balance, technical finesse, and historical knowledge.

CPO's previous release with the soloists and ensembles of the Boston Early Music Festival was awarded two prestigious prizes. The recording of Charpentier’s opera La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs received the Grammy Award for the Best Opera Production in February 2015 and recently won the Klassik-Echo 2015, again for the Best Opera Recording of the Year. Prior to this double success, other productions by cpo and BEMF had been nominated for Gramophone Awards. In the category of the Best Opera Production these were Ariadne by Johann Georg Conradi and Thésée and Psyché by Jean-Baptiste Lully. In addition, Thésée and Psyché received nominations in the category honoring Baroque Vocal Works.

Now the American ensemble joins forces with successful soloists like Aaron Sheehan and Teresa Wakim for our production of Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea in the version of 1718, which was composed for the landed estate of the Earl of Carnarvon and does not recycle music from the earlier version. Both Acis and Galatea and the cantata Sarei troppo felice heard here represent decisive turning points in Handel’s career. The Italian cantata came at the beginning of the one and half decades spent by Handel in the service of patrons. Acis and Galatea marks the highpoint of this phase and therefore, like the cantata before it, clearly renders recognizable the musical means available to him in the private ensembles of his employers. Moreover, Acis and Galatea contains the musical and textual seeds of the English oratorio, which after 1742 completely supplanted opera compositions.

A composition, as a phenomenon or an act of creation, can be understood as a reflection of the time in which it was written. An improvisation, in some sense, is also an act of creation, a kind of composition, and it also reflects its time. Performing transcriptions, “borrowings” (even of whole pieces), remakes, and quotations was a common thing at the time of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759). Handel himself, as the first cosmopolitical composer in the world, was open to various styles and cultures and would quote and remake his own works. He was a Great Master, undoubtfully equal to Johann Sebastian Bach, but he was not a purist, which may explain some of the solutions we used on this album. Handel was a star and a celebrity of his times. He would compose, understand, and love the genre of opera, which, out of all kinds of art, is closest to the man (with his issues, traumas, and challenges); a genre that is full of life and “venous” like a human body. He was perfectly at ease in the world of theatre, stage, and entertainment. All the above can be easily heard in the harmony and melodies of his sonatas. In some way, we are following this way of thinking – being fascinated by the music of the Great Master, we allow ourselves some surprising (in our opinion) differentiations and modifications. We are doing this here and now, drawing on the past eras (classicism and especially romanticism [sic!]). We are also not afraid to refer to different forms of popular music such as jazz or even pop music. We are doing it, because the music of our time, i.e. popular music, is all around us and sneaks into our minds. We are being impregnated with it beyond our conscience and will, since it is “everywhere we listen”, i.e. in restaurants, shops, on our way to work. Although this aspect of entertainment stands out a bit on our recording, we decided not to remove it. The sonatas presented on this CD are not one-dimensional – there are many parenthesis, interrupted thoughts, and surprising endings. However, the listener will quickly find the beauty, charm, elegance, logic, and depth of this music, always combined with masterful harmony and melodies. The audience can notice perfect, but natural and sincere melodies, in which Handel vents his feelings in a bit uncontrolled and improvised way; feelings that are “poignant in their poetry.” It is especially the slow movements that sound like elegies, epitaphs, or odes, full of pain, longing, mysticism, and wisdom. “Our art, weary of post-Beethovenesque and post-Wagneresque art, can find in Handel’s music (similarly to chamber music by Mozart) a poetic refuge, to heal its futile anxiety and to experience again silence and wellbeing.” Paweł Losakiewicz & Robert Morawski

In 1731, at the height of his London fame, Handel created his 28th opera seria: a vocal pyrotechnic about the rivalry, in love and war, between Alexander the Great and the Indian King Porus. Rage and spite, love and glory drive the extraordinary arias that Handel entrusted to two of his favourite singers: the castrato star Senesino for the title role, and the soprano Anna Maria Strada del Pò as the treacherous Cleofide. It was a sign of the work's success and the prestige of its cast. Poro was performed twenty times in 1731, a virtually exceptional figure. The young tenor Marco Angioloni - singing the role of Alexander - brings this opera back to life with his Ensemble Il Groviglio, and a magnificent cast that would have delighted Handel!

Freedom is a dominant theme in the English oratorios of Georg Friedrich Handel. These grand works are mostly based on biblical stories that deal with resistance, suppression, captivity and, finally, freedom. Debut album by young countertenor Oscar Verhaar. Oscar selected eight arias drawn from Haendel's English oratorios. Diversified moods and atmospheres and the support of La Sfera Armoniosa baroque orchestra make this disc a constant pleasure to listen to.

Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre return to Handel with a complete recording of his opera Alcina. The title role is interpreted by Magdalena Kožená, who reunites with Les Musiciens and maestro Minkowski after a series of acclaimed baroque recordings. She is joined by an excellent casts of soloists, consisting of Erin Morley (Morgana), Anna Bonitatibus (Ruggiero), Elzabeth DeShong (Bradamante), Alois Muhlbacher (Oberto), Valerio Contaldo (Oronte) and Alex Rosen (Melisso). This studio recording transports the listener to Alcina’s enchanted island, and shows Handel at the peak of his power: the score is dramatic, lush and colourful as well as introspective and profound where the story requires it. Since its foundation in 1982, and under the baton of its founder and musical director Marc Minkowski, Les Musiciens du Louvre have developed into one of the world’s best period-instrument ensembles, with a vast discography. The ensemble returns to Pentatone after having presented Mozart’s Mass in C Minor in 2020. Alcina is star mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožena’s fifth album as part of her exclusive collaboration with Pentatone, after having presented the baroque cantatas recital album Il giardino dei sospiri and the songs in chamber-musical setting project Soiree in 2019, as well as Nostalgia together with Yefim Bronfman (2021) and Folk Songs with the Czech Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle (2023). The other soloists all make their Pentatone debut.

REVIEW:

There are relatively few recordings of Alcina out there, even though Handel’s Tempest-like opera of infatuation, rescue and enchantment is one of his most popular on stage. This new one scores highly, partly for the dramatic relish with which the conductor Marc Minkowski and his Musiciens du Louvre dispatch the music, but principally for a tour de force performance in the title role from the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená.

— Guardian (UK)

On this double disc set, musicians from the (Western) European Baroque tradition (and from a Christian background), are joined by musicians from Jewish and Muslim backgrounds. (Capriccio)

Handel, G.F.: Cantatas - Hwv 109, 112, 132C, 166, 175

Among Handel's seventeen English oratorios, Theodora (1750) is unique. The story is not taken from the Bible, it is set in the Christian era, there is no national triumph and it does not end in joy. At the end, the hero and heroine are dead, the community with which the audience identifies is in mortal danger, and the final chorus is in a minor key. As a musical drama, it is the direct ancestor of Dialogues des Carmelites. At the age of 65, Handel produced a work that was too radical and complex for most of his audience. Today, Theodora is regarded as a benchmark "thinking person’s opera", both deeply stimulating and powerfully moving.