Handel

Alessandro Severo is a pasticcio, an Italian term meaning a jumble or hodgepodge. In the operatic context, it refers to a work made up of music composed for another occasion and reused with little or no change. Handel produced three pasticcio operas based on his own music: Oreste (1734), Alessandro Severo (1738), and Giove in Argo (1739); only the latter contains any substantial new music. With this release, we now have recordings of all three.
FANFARE: Ron Salemi

It could be argued that Händel’s Giulio Cesare is, in a sense, the La Bohème of Baroque opera: surely performed both more frequently and more widely afield than any of Händel’s other operas, Giulio Cesare is the most popular of Händel’s operas and the one that is most known even by audiences with limited exposure to Baroque opera. This familiarity led to the long-held assumption that Giulio Cesare was likewise the finest of Händel’s operatic scores, a supposition that has been challenged during the past two decades by more frequent – and more impressive – performances of Händel’s lesser-known operas…

Saul is one of Handel's largest oratorios; its rich orchestration includes trumpets, trombones, timpani, harp, and carillon. René Jacobs certainly wrests every drop of color from this luxurious array of instruments, particularly in the choruses, which are gloriously grand but also extremely exciting. In Nos. 20-24, where the populace (with maddening relentlessness) praises David above Saul to the incessant jangling of the carillon, it's easy to understand why the king objects to the unseemly revelry. Handel's music wonderfully suggests both the joyous celebration and seeds of jealousy being planted in Saul's mind. Similarly, Jacobs' careful choice of colors for the continuo part makes the famous "Dead March" far more solemn than it often sounds, an appropriate introduction to Handel's "Elegy on the death of Saul and Jonathan".

After the success of Alexander's Feast, a setting of the much admired ode by John Dryden, it was wondered: would the result be greater still if Handel could be persuaded to set the words of a poet even greater than Dryden? Such were the thoughts of an important group of Handel's friends centred around the philosopher James Harris and including Charles Jennens (later the librettist of Messiah) and the Fourth Earl of Shaftesbury. It was under their influence that Handel came to set the poetry of John Milton, first in L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, and later in the oratorio Samson.

Ambroisie presents a new edition of one of Handel's Italian period masterpieces, Rodrigo, with an exceptional cast led by Maria Riccarda Wesserling in the title role, María Bayo as his wife Esilena, Sharon Rostorf-Zamir as his young lover Florinda and Max Emanuel Cencic as Fernando. Following Amadigi di Gaula earlier this year, Rodrigo is the second Handel opera on the label conducted by Eduardo López Banzo. The release follows a European tour with the same cast and orchestra, Al Ayre Español, resulting in an interpretation that will undoubtedly lead to a new understanding of the piece almost exactly 300 years after it was written.

One might think that with all of the attention that Handel’s music has received over the years and especially since the tercentenary of his birth in 1985, that no stone has been left unturned in the effort to accord the composer his due. Indeed, there have been revelatory and monumental cycles of his operas and oratorios—especially Messiah—as well as numerous releases of Music for the Royal Fireworks, Water Music, the Concerti grossi, ops. 3 and 6—the list goes on and on, almost ad nauseam. As with any composer, though, there are darker recesses in Handel’s œuvre that seemed to have attracted the interest of a multitude of dust bunnies, but few performers. This Hyperion recording, originally recorded in 1988 and released under the title Music for Royal Occasions, holds three such works specifically composed for English courtly festivities of various import between 1713 and 1736.