Lumi 32

French contralto Delphine Galou has gained attention in opera performances and now with this debut recital album, covers a variety of Italian Baroque music. Much of it is sacred in one way or another, making the biker jacket on the cover just a bit overindulgent for the always innovative Alpha label. But the voice is worth the price of admission in itself: silky and smooth in the lower register, with a metallic edge that sparks into fire higher up.

This set contains 8 operas by Handel in 22 CDs. In many ways, this box is a mix-bag: some of them performed in the "traditional style" with severe cuts, and others in "historically-informed" performances. Selection includes some of the most popular Handel operas and some of the rarely-performed. It's the latter category that one should pay closer attention.

Alessandro Stradella was, along with Henry Purcell and Heinrich von Biber, among the most striking and idiosyncratic composers of the late seventeenth century. He is known principally for his cantatas on sacred subjects such as "La Susanna" and "San Giovanni Battista," which prefigure Handel's oratorios, and from which Handel borrowed freely. Stradella's musical eccentricities were paralleled by his irregular life. A member of the minor nobility, he ran through his inheritance while young, and thereafter supplemented his musical earnings by questionable financial dealings that incurred the anger of influential families.

I do think that this Decca set is arguably the best compilation reissue of such a bulk of Handel work which has been released in a long time, just in time to commemorate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the passing of il caro Sassone. There is a lot in this box, absence of libretti notwithstanding. The enclosed booklet is essential to navigate you through the track listings and timings and little else but a small general essay on GFH.

By John Van Note

This series of Italian cantatas by three eminent contemporaries makes for refined and focused listening. Cencic…marries virtuosity with colour. The result is singing of great reach and range, in which verbal sensitivity and bravura execution are usually put at the service of the music.

Giovanni Maria Legrenzi is no longer the household name it was during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Lengrenzi's shameful neglect by the record industry has been hard to fathom, but this new Divox release of his chamber oratorio «The death of the Repentant Heart» could well launch the much-needed revival for the Venetian master - a composer who took over where Gabrieli and Monteverdi left off. Legrenzi, better known for his operas than his religious works durîng his lifetime (1626-1690), was widely admired (and copied) all over Europe.