Cleopatra Arias

The fact that the role of Handel's Cleopatra includes enough music to fill out a CD, and that, combined with the music's demands for immense virtuosity and versatility, makes it a daunting challenge and Natalie Dessay is impressive in her account of these excerpts. Dessay's singing is not entirely consistent throughout the album, recorded in 2010, whether because some arias are simply better suited to her voice than others, or because she was not at her best for some of the recording sessions. While the agility and precision of her coloratura are always intact, in some selections, such as the arias "Tutto può donna vezzosa," and "Venere bella," Dessay's voice sounds lighter than it does on albums from earlier in her career, and even a little breathy in her lower register. In other arias, though, she conveys the remarkable fullness and purity for which she is renowned. "Se pieta di me non senti" is breathtaking; her gleaming tone is practically voluptuous and she spins lines of miraculously velvety smoothness and searing emotional intensity.

Natalie Dessay is one of great delights of the opera world today and her recordings have all been excellent. This however ,in my opinion , is her best disc to date. Her voice is so suited to the music. My only hope is that if a production of Giulio Cesare comes to Royal Opera House they cast Natalie Dessay . The conductor (Emmanuelle Haïm) and Orchestra (Le Concert d'Astrée) bring the music alive. This disc is 65 minutes of sheer joy.

For her first Sony Classical album of Mozart arias, the young Swiss soprano Regula Mühlemann received fantastic reviews all over the world. She was introduced to an audience of millions in 2016 at the ZDF Advent Concert from the Frauenkirche in Dresden, where she conquered the audience along with the second soloist of the evening, Sonya Yoncheva.

Like Handel had done some years earlier, Johann Adolf Hasse left his native Germany in 1721 to gain some Italian polish, He eventually settled in Naples and studied with Porpora and Alessandro Scarlatti. In 1730 he moved to Dresden where he became Kapellmeister, married one of Handel's divas and the two became the power couple of late baroque opera.
Robert Hugill

The German soprano Anna Prohaska joins Alpha Classics for several recording projects. Her first recital brings together two superb African queens – Dido and Cleopatra – and follows them all over Europe during the first century of opera, from the 1640s to 1740. A firework display of arias, virtuosic and tragic by turns, written by the leading personalities of Baroque music (Cavalli, Handel, Purcell, Hasse) and composers still awaiting rediscovery suchas Sartorio, Graupner and the Venetian Castrovillari./quote]

Later in life Hasse’s operas would be spoken of in the same breath as the poet Metastasio, whose librettos he frequently set, as though the two were one: a high-minded, classicizing Marc Antonio e Cleopatra. It brought Hasse a degree of renown in wealthy Neapolitan circles, and a commission from the San Bartolomeo opera house for Il Sesostrate . That in turn blossomed into a lucrative match-up, with seven opera seria composed and produced in six years, as well as a number of comic intermezzo operas and a full-length opera buffa for other venues. Hasse was suddenly on the fast track to fame and contracts.

Carl Heinrich Graun was court composer to Frederick the Great of Prussia, and this opera was chosen to open the new opera house in Berlin in 1742. It was a great success, but Handel's opera on the same subject had appeared less than two decades before, and had anyone been familiar with that one, Graun's might have come as a disappointment. Handel gets under his characters' skins–Cleopatra's eight arias tell us everything we have to know about her, for instance–while Graun (merely) offers some beautiful, well-orchestrated, at-times exciting music. Any composer would have been proud to compose Cesare's heart-stoppingly vengeful last-act aria "Voglio strage", and any Read more mezzo (or castrato or countertenor) would be happy to sing it. Here, Iris Vermillion is spectacular, and elsewhere in the opera she's as heroic, romantic, and colorful as our hero ought to be… Robert Levine