Acknowledged without reservation as the greatest composer working in England in the 18th century, Georg Frideric Handel is revered worldwide as a master composer. His Harpsichord Suites are among the finest instrumental works of the period, and eight of those are presented here by Gilbert Rowland, one of Europe's foremost harpsichordists.

In Spring 2019, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, led by John Eliot Gardiner, presented a critically-acclaimed European tour of Handel’s opera 'Semele', including Alexandra Palace Theatre in London, where this live recording took place. Semele had not been performed by John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi ensembles since they originally recorded it in the 1980s and this recording gives listeners the chance to hear a fuller version of the work. A glamorous team of young soloists joins the Monteverdi ensembles to bring the story of Semele to life, including celebrated English soprano Louise Alder, who takes on the title role, with the young tenor Hugo Hymas portraying the amorous Jupiter.

-----

REVIEW:

A new recording is always welcome, especially when it comes from someone who knows his dramatical business as John Eliot Gardiner does. Alder is a happy choice, her voice rich, fluid and precise, and her agile and alert acting skills finding ideal projection in the wonderful clutch of arias Handel sets before her..Hymas has just the smooth vocal beauty needed for a sympathetic Jupiter.

– Gramophone

Following in their series of Gramophone Award and BBC Music Magazine Award winning recordings, Gabrieli's first Handel recording in over a decade is particularly special - recreating in painstaking detail the very first performance of L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, given in 1740, with additional instrumental repertoire including a Handel organ concerto and two concerti grossi. With a reputation as peerless Handelians, Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & players bring meticulous research to every performance and recording project, and are joined on this disc by a stunning selection of soloists.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The work was never performed; its main characters have no singing parts; the music written for the original project was later reworked and reused in several other stage productions. So what exactly is the attraction of Handel’s incidental music for Alceste, a play by Tobias Smollett based on the tragedy by Euripides? First, we should know that the original production—what would have been an elaborate and costly affair, involving a host of performers, supported by a large orchestra and showy scenery—was abruptly cancelled before the opening. Various theories exist as to the reason, but suffice it to say, after the event Handel happily carved up his score to satisfy the needs of other productions, and Smollett’s play ultimately was lost. Which brings us back to the question: What’s the attraction here, with this reassembled program of (much of) Handel’s music for Alceste? For me, the answer is, the two gorgeous soprano arias sung by the Muse Calliope, “Gentle Morpheus, son of night; That when bright Aurora’s beams” and “Come, Fancy, empress of the brain”. But I have to add that although Handel graced these arias with some of his loveliest tunes, they are made extraordinary here by the singing of Lucy Crowe. And this is the true attraction of this program and this disc, which is not to discount the fine contributions of the rest of the cast and players.

It’s just that Crowe so completely embraces, embodies, and possesses her music, her voice so captivating, every phrase delivered with the natural, unmannered purity that comes with consummate technique and comprehensive textual understanding. For her, a climactic high note (as at the close of “Come fancy empress…”) is not an objective but a thing to savor in the context of the whole line, indeed of the whole song; and the reams of twirling runs are a means, albeit a free-spirited and fancy means, through the vibrant, verdant harmonic texture. Ah, but that high note—and also those many earlier passages of leaping intervals—are so perfectly sung, all the more affecting because they are so fleeting, uncatchable, and as a consequence, inevitably repeatable. And those signature Handelian runs—no one sings these with such ease, unencumbered as a bird in flight.

To be sure, there’s lots more to savor on this disc, including Christian Curnyn’s absolutely spot-on direction, keeping things moving with his superb orchestra at a theatrically cheerable pace, even without the actual “theatrical” bits of the original play to define the action (whatever it was). Who cares, when the music is this typically, engagingly Handelian? My only reservations are the usual ones in Handel’s vocal music: the tenor and bass, who both have very fine voices and an excellent sense of style, manage their melismatic passages via the “ha-ha-ha” school of vocalism—which is not only distracting (I would even say irritating), but technically faulty and musically unjustifiable. They are by no means serious offenders—but the mannerism is noticeable; however, for the pure pleasure of Crowe’s singing, these are distractions that you can easily overlook, or skip over. This is one not to miss.

-- David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Alceste was planned as a lavish collaboration between the impresario John Rich, the celebrated set-designer Servandoni and the rambunctious author of Roderick Random, Tobias Smollett, but it never made it to the stage. Notes by the librettist Thomas Morell hint that the play may have been cancelled owing to Handel’s incidental music being too difficult for the cast. However, it seems that Rich may simply have decided that an adaptation of a drama by Euripides was too risky a venture. This was, after all, a period in which the tastes of the London audience were as volatile as the explosives that had destroyed Servandoni’s Temple of Peace during the Green Park performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.

Christian Curnyn’s delicious recording of the surviving score is amplified with a sinfonia from Admeto and a passacaglia from Radamisto. These fizzy, sexily swung orchestral additions emphasise the parallels between Handel’s incidental music and Purcell’s music for King Arthur, The Fairy Queen and The Tempest.

Though Alceste was written in 1749-50 and features one aria that could only date from that time (the exquisite lullaby ‘Gentle Morpheus, son of night’), it observes the contours of a Restoration masque. Alcestis’s journey to the Underworld is enchanting, with Curnyn’s fleet strings, intimately proportioned chorus, and polished soloists, soprano Lucy Crowe, tenor Benjamin Hulett and bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams. The choral writing marries the pastoral delicacy of Handel’s Acis and Galatea with stylings from Purcell’s Odes to St Cecilia, showing Handel’s feel for local tastes, and Curnyn’s perceptive approach to Handel.
Performance: 5 (out of 5); Sound: 5 (out of 5)

-- Anna Picard, BBC Music Magazine

There’s nothing more heartbreaking in surveying the current state of the classical music industry than the knowledge that, amidst the constant flow of useless dreck hitting the market daily, there are wonderful sets such as this one that will never receive the acclaim (and financial success) that they deserve because they will simply get lost in the shuffle, or be too difficult to source, or disappear from the active catalog in record time. Really, it’s infuriating. So I’m going to break one of my usual rules and recommend this set urgently by “writing long,” in this case adapting some of the copy that I included in my recent book on Handel for Amadeus Press.

Between roughly 1706 and 1710, Handel composed twenty-eight cantatas with instrumental accompaniment, out of about a hundred in all from the same period. Twenty-two are included in this box, which claims to be “complete,” but never mind. No one knows for sure the exact number that Handel wrote; every now and then a new one still turns up. Clori, Tirsi e Fileno,for instance, only appeared complete in 1960. The rest are for solo voice and continuo, and only one of those, La Lucrezia(HWV145), has achieved anything like wider exposure, at least on disc. On the other hand, some of the instrumental cantatas are making their way into the consciousness of connoisseurs, even if they remain all but unknown to the wider public. We need to fix that. These are gems.

The cantatas with instruments come in every possible shape and size, from simple songs to mini-operas. Later in the century the solo cantata, in the hands of Alessandro Scarlatti (Domenico’s dad), became relatively standardized as a short piece containing two recitative/aria pairs, and some of Handel’s do that as well, but there is no hard and fast rule. In these works he was demonstrating a newly acquired mastery of his craft. He enjoyed total freedom in creating them, writing with love and evident care for his Italian patrons, many of whom wrote the poems. Handel took arias, or bits of them, from all of these pieces and incorporated them into later works. They constitute his musical “savings account,” and the fact he was still mining them decades later should be taken as the strongest possible indication of their high quality and musical value.

Although the instrumentation ranges from solo guitar or flute, to a few violins, to what is effectively a full orchestral complement, this really is vocal chamber music. Even if we are familiar with a particular number from a later setting, there’s a very special freshness and intimacy in hearing the original settings. For example, the aria “Ogni vento” from Agrippina, involves the full string orchestra with oboes in the opera. Scored for just two violin parts plus continuo as the aria “Bella fiamma” in the cantata Aminta e Fillide, the music has a distinctive rhythmic clarity and bounce (sound clip), especially as sung here by soprano Nuria Rial. Both versions are delightful; neither is inherently preferable.

Many of the cantatas involve characters that we have come to know. Armida, of Rinaldo fame, gets to vent her misery all over again in Armida abbandonata. The legendary story of Hero and Leander takes center stage in Qual ti riveggio. Apollo e Dafne tells the familiar tale of the god’s pursuit of the nature-loving Daphne, and her subsequent transformation into a laurel tree. The participants in Echeggiate, festeggiate, Numi eterni are all Roman gods and goddesses, while the fickle shepherdess Clori turns up on more than one occasion. Clori, Tirsi e Fileno, a pastoral comedy, is the longest of the instrumental cantatas. It has two parts, or acts, and it serves as a lighthearted counterpart in serenata form to Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (which these forces also recorded but which is not included in this set, from some reason).

I have a special affection for Diana cacciatrice (Diana the Huntress), with its virtuoso writing for soprano and trumpet, here sung by the splendid Roberta Invernizzi (sound clip), with an additional soprano voice offstage “in echo”. But then, all of the singers are excellent and they deserve individual mention. Aside from Invernizzi and Nuria Rial, there are sopranos Emanuela Galli, Raffaela Milanesi, Maria Granzia Schiavo, Yetzabel Arias Fernández; alto Romino Basso; and basses Thomas E. Bauer, Furio Zanasi, and Salvo Vitale. The instrumentalists of La Risonanza play beautifully under the direction of Fabio Bonizzoni, and the sonics are just about perfect.

I do wish that Aci had been included, as well as the Chamber Duets and Trios also issued in this superb series, but we already have more than eight hours here of first-rate, quasi-unknown Handel. These discs will provide countless moments of pure joy. and they belong in every serious collection. The booklet contains multilingual notes and Italian-only texts, but on disc seven you can find PDFs of all of the original booklets with texts and translations in English, German, Spanish, and French. Essential, this, and not just for opera fans or Handel lovers. This gorgeous, lyrical, intimate, warmly humane music is for everyone.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

In the "Concerti Opus 3" Handel prescribes the standard orchestra for the late Baroque era: two oboes, strings and a continuo group. However, we learn from the solo-tutti supplements and the court account books that the ensemble was in fact larger and more polyphonic than the original, simple manuscript and the subsequent modern score suggest: occasionally the number of bassoons was equal to that of the cellos, though they were only given solo parts when they were disengaged from the bass group of instruments. It was common practice too - not in C�then or Hamburg, it is true, but certainly in Dresden, Paris and London - for at least two if not three oboists to be assigned to each part, these being augmented by special instruments such as the old-style recorder and the new transverse flute, and after 1750 the Clarinet. The Concerto Opus 3, no. 1 requires a total of six obbligato wind instruments (two oboes, two recorders and two bassoons) and is therefore no "odd man out" composition, but rather reproduces fairly accurately the minimum range that an orchestra at Handel's disposal would have comprised: in the middle movement of the concerto, two ripieno oboists take up recorders, and then return to the fold as oboists afterwards.

For his ''Occasional Oratorio'', composed in 1746 in an age of personal and political upheaval, Handel made generous use of much of his own earlier material, and this resulted in something quite close to an anthology: a choice collection of his most beautiful and most famous pieces - as it were, a ''Best Of''. The ''Messiah'' librettist Charles Jennens complained loudly that the oratorio was ''a triumph for a victory not yet gain'd'', and that its libretto, by a certain Newburgh Hamilton, was an ''inconcevable jumble of John Milton and Edmund Spenser''. Nevertheless, the ''Occasional Oratorio'' offers the modern listener magnificent and largely familiar melodies, highly virtuosic Baroque arias, moving choruses and, above all, a magnificent Late Baroque sound that, in this extremely compact score, is quite unique. Audiences at the time probably considered this to be ''Handel at his best'', and today's public doubtlessly shares that opinion. This virtuoso and colorful interpretation, recorded recently on February 11, 2017 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz, was an exemplary success, delighting the audience and the trade press alike. Howard Arman conducted the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, teh Akademie fur Alte Music Berlin with its historically informed performance practice, and a line-up of highly talented English soloists.

Influential German poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes reinvented the Passion oratorio tradition, transforming it's textures into a much-admired poetic meditation that took hold of the imagination of many German Baroque composers. Of several settings Handel's is by far the most famous, creating an eloquent and moving score from his friend's libretto. This acclaimed staged version directed by Walter Sutcliffe extends the vision of the original by asking fundamental questions about the evolution of mankind and it's dangerous implications for planet Earth.