Handel

George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel was a German, later British, Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming well-known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, and organ concertos. Handel received important training in Halle-upon-Saale and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition.

It is not always easy to avoid writing a shade smugly about the arrangements Mozart made of choral works by Handel. Nowadays, increasingly, we try to listen to such works as Acis and Galatea and the Cecilian Ode in the form in which Handel composed them; to hear them through the prism of the classical musical consciousness is disconcerting. For once we feel that we know better than Mozart. Well, so we do, about Handel and the way he makes the best effect (at least on us); but a different kind of historical awareness is needed here, one that puts us into the frame of mind of late eighteenth-century Vienna and its perception of Handel.

Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, HWV 17), commonly known simply as Giulio Cesare, is an Italian opera in three acts written for the Royal Academy of Music by George Frideric Handel in 1724. The libretto was written by Nicola Francesco Haym who used an earlier libretto by Giacomo Francesco Bussani, which had been set to music by Antonio Sartorio.

In the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, Alison Balsom celebrates the heroic era of the Baroque trumpet in works by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and Henry Purcell (1658 or 1659-1695), whose anthems, odes, sinfonias and operas have provided the music for numerous royal celebrations from their own day to the present.

Rodrigo is Handel's fifth opera. His first four operas were written for Hamburg. Almira, the first of them, survives, but Nero, Florindo, and Dafne are almost completely lost. Rodrigo, first performed in the autumn of 1707 (exact date unknown), shows a great advance on Almira after Handel had spent less than a year in Italy; his mature style is already evident…