Handel

Ezio (Aetius) is an opera by George Frideric Handel. It was his last opera based on a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. Metastatio's story was partly inspired by Jean Racine's play Britannicus...

This recording contains a beautiful mingling of Handel’s lush cantata with a recently rediscovered, unique Bach aria. The Bach Sinfonia and the Handel Choir of Baltimore capture the triumphant splendor of Handel’s setting of John Dryden’s ode to Alexander the Great. Discovered in the spring of 2005 by musicologist Michael Maul, the ensembles had the honor of performing Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn’ ihn for the American Musicological Society. Daniel Abraham and Melinda O’Neal’s ensemble collaboration is one of the first to record and disseminate this exciting newfound work of J. S. Bach.

Alexander's Feast (HWV 75) is an ode with music by George Frideric Handel set to a libretto by Newburgh Hamilton. Hamilton adapted his libretto from John Dryden's ode Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Music (1697) which had been written to celebrate Saint Cecilia's Day. Jeremiah Clarke (whose score is now lost) set the original ode to music.
Handel composed the music in January 1736, and the work received its premiere at the Covent Garden Theatre, London, on 19 February 1736.

It is immediately evident from the Overture that the orchestral sound is going to be rich and ponderous, and, although Harnoncourt works wonders in varying the dynamics and getting the rhythms to dance…the effect is more suggestive of those gigantic mid-Victorian Handel events in the Crystal Palace than anything that Mozart, let alone Handel, could have imagined.

When Handel introduced English oratorios to London in the 1730s, he did not confine himself to sacred subjects, exploring also Classical myths, with texts based on Roman and Greek literature. The Choice of Hercules marks Handel’s last realisation of a Classical tale. It started life in 1749 as music for Alceste, but the Covent Garden production was cancelled, leaving Handel with an hour of superb music on his hands. By the summer of 1750 he had adapted several numbers and added new ones, and in 1751 it premiered as ‘an additional New Act’ concluding a performance of the ode Alexander’s Feast. Much of the music from the original conception (the story of a loyal wife who dies to save her husband and is subsequently rescued from the Underworld by Hercules) transferred easily to its new guise, for example the noble opening Sinfonia, originally intended to mark Hercules’ return from the Underworld, now entirely apt for the entrance of the young Hercules in the new drama.

In a year of Handel celebration and many new recordings, this is a welcome addition to the discography. Stephen Layton, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a stellar group of soloists—in fact, the best in solo Handel singing that this country has to offer—present a disc of three of the Chandos anthems which is sure to achieve the same critical and public acclaim as the recent Dettingen Te Deum from Trinity.

Horst-Tanu Margraf (26 October 1903 − 1978) was a German conductor, Generalmusikdirektor of Halle (Saale) from 1950 to 1969. Margraf was music director in Lemberg during World War II. In Halle he was one of the founders of the Handel Festival. He conducted the Staatskapelle Halle in several operas of George Frideric Handel, some in their first modern production, such as Rinaldo in 1954. He conducted for the festival Radamisto (1955), Poro (1956), Admetos (1958), Giulio Cesare (1959) and Imeneo (1960). In 1966 he conducted a recording of a shortened version of Imeneo with Günther Leib in the title role, Hans-Joachim Rotzsch as Tirinto, and Sylvia Geszty as Rosmene.

In light of Handel’s own connections with Oxford University in the early 1730s and the ensuing performance tradition of his works that was quickly established there, it is ironic that Cambridge have possessed the more vibrant Handelian tradition in subsequent generations (it also boasts the superior collection of Handel musical sources thanks to the Fitzwilliam Museum). Indeed, Cambridge has been central to the promotion of Handel’s oratorios as great drama: the great Handel scholar Winton Dean was converted to the cause during his participation in a staging of Saul while an undergraduate there. More latterly Cambridge has also played a valuable part in the revival of Handel’s operas, has been the foremost academic hothouse for producing the finest English freelance choral singers and soloists, and has played a crucial role in the development in the period instrument movement (The latter-day Academy of Ancient Music is still based in the town).

"Gideon is an oratorio put together after Handel’s death by John Christopher Smith, son of the composer’s long-serving secretary and copyist of the same name…One thing should be made plain at once about Gideon (and this, I fear, constitutes a slap on the wrist for Naxos): the balance of materials included by the younger Smith is, on the evidence of Naxos’s own booklet, not at all as described in the blurb on the back of the box. There, we are told “The 1769 oratorio Gideon, with a new libretto by Handel’s former collaborator Thomas Morell, uses music largely drawn from Handel’s work, sacred and secular, with a lesser number of elements by Smith himself.”