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)