Fede E Amor

For a long time, a large portion of Handel’s early opera Rodrigo was thought to have been lost. It was not until 1974 that the printed libretto turned up again and nine years later the third act was found in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Handel collection. On August 29, 1984, finally, the work was revived during the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music and in 2019 it’s on the programme at the Göttingen International Handel Festival. The opera narrates a freely adapted version of the end to the regency of the Last Visigoth King Roderich. In the libretto by Francesco Silvani, however, the reason behind it is less the lust for power on the part of his opponents than the thirst for vengeance of his spurned mistress. It was back in 1707 in Rome that George Frideric Handel wrote Rodrigo.

SEON (Studio Erichson) is a period music label by the legendary producer Wolf Erichson. Erichson founded the label in 1969 as one of the first labels dedicated only to authentic music. The recordings were made with the best available recording techniques of the time and still deliver a high quality product in line with today's standards. This special boxset offers all SEON CD reissues from the late 90s on 85 CDs in a limited edition boxset.

Every child who ever learnt the recorder or played in a school orchestra will probably know the famous ‘Minuet’ included in the Overture, but they can be forgiven for knowing little else from the work since it is so rarely performed. That its premiere in London in 1737 was a failure had little to do with Handel’s score but more with a growing public indifference to Italian opera. The music, as seasoned Handelians will not need to be told, is of high quality (though not perhaps at once among his most alluring scores), and Antonio Salvis’s libretto, concerned with politics and romance, provides the composer with opportunity for lively duets and evocative ‘simile’ arias. The cast is strong, though not uniformly so, with soprano Julianne Baird in the title role.