Handel

In 1717, Handel was in dire straits. Living in London, his pension of 200 pounds a year for teaching the Royal princesses had stopped, and the public's enthusiasm for opera had faded. Fortunately, he was to gain a new patron: James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon and Duke of Chandos. Brydges offered Handel residence at Cannons, his newly built palace in Edgware, then a rural area outside London. Set up as a rival court to King George I, he employed Handel to replace Johann Pepusch as Kapellmeister. Among his commissions were the Chandos Anthems and Chandos Te Deum.

If, by this date, the London public was tiring of the Italian opera in which Handel had been excelling for decades, and the composer was now turning both to the oratorio and in the direction of the galant style, he was still able to call upon divos and divas of the quality of La Francesina and Giovanni Battista Andreoni to perform his music. Though not a success in its Lincoln’s Inn Fields staging in London, Imeneo was performed by Handel as his only Italian work during his season in Dublin (which also saw the first performance of Messiah), complete with additional arias to add to those praised in 1740 and a pruning of the libretto (which hadn’t received approval).

This recording of Handel's Acis and Galatea (or Acis und Galatea) features the German translation and arrangement completed by Mozart in Vienna circa 1788, per the instructions of the Baron Gottfried von Swieten to "modernize" Handel's pieces - including Alexander's Feast, Messiah, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, and Acis and Galatea. Mozart kept much of Handel's original string arrangements, but proceeded to layer harmonies with a degree of sophistication that Handel could only have dreamed of.

Every child who ever learnt the recorder or played in a school orchestra will probably know the famous ‘Minuet’ included in the Overture, but they can be forgiven for knowing little else from the work since it is so rarely performed. That its premiere in London in 1737 was a failure had little to do with Handel’s score but more with a growing public indifference to Italian opera. The music, as seasoned Handelians will not need to be told, is of high quality (though not perhaps at once among his most alluring scores), and Antonio Salvis’s libretto, concerned with politics and romance, provides the composer with opportunity for lively duets and evocative ‘simile’ arias. The cast is strong, though not uniformly so, with soprano Julianne Baird in the title role.

This is a 2004 production of a Handel rarity performed at the beautiful setting of the Schlosstheater Potsdam under the direction of Axel Köhler. Handel's five act opera Teseo was premièred in 1713 at the Queen's Theatre in London. After flopping with his previous work Il pastor fido Handel reverted to the format of his big success Rinaldo and again created an opera with a heroic subject, sophisticated stagecraft and a big orchestra. Teseo has many qualities of the French tragédie lyrique style, such as the five-act structure, big arias in the middle of scenes (meaning that characters do not have to leave the stage after their arias), a secondary romantic couple, many short arias and recitatives and many accompanied recitatives. In 1947 the opera was rediscovered and staged for the first time after Handel's death at the Göttinger Händelfestpiele.

Even though it has hardly been performed and rarely recorded “L’Allegro il Penseroso ed il Moderato” has to be counted as one of Handel’s most beautiful and musically valuable oratorios. Its lack of popularity is solely due to the complexities of performance and the un-dramatic subject matter. In so doing, Handel bestowed some of his best music upon Charles Jennen’s reworking of John Milton’s text. With this recording, Peter Neumann together with the Cologne Chamber Choir and the Collegium Cartusianum have brought this wonderful work to life, guaranteeing that it will sit proudly amongst the other oratorio works of Handel.

It is not known when Handel composed his keyboard works. A number of them probably date from his youth in Germany. His teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow is known to have owned a large collection of German and Italian keyboard music. And French music was well known in Germany when Handel lived there. So the very fact that Handel’s suites show a wide range of influences – German, Italian and French – doesn’t necessarily mean that they were written after his stay in Italy. At the same time it is likely that some of his keyboard works were written after his arrival in England. It is suggested that some of them were used for keyboard lessons.

If only for his melodic genius, Handel would have been forever acknowledged as one of history's greatest composers. These delightful sonatas for recorder provide abundant evidence to support that claim, and Marion Verbruggen's warm, resonant recorder and brilliant flute prove the perfect partners for bringing these rarely heard pieces to life.