It is usually the big nineteenth-century opera sets that are bought for their singers; but with a line-up of principals such as we have here Handel too is swept into the golden net. Lucia Popp, two years into her career after her Vienna debut, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry: that is a quartet which in its time may have seemed no more than standard stuff, but at this date looks starry indeed. […] The Orfeo, for one thing, is sung in German instead of Italian; it has cuts, though many fewer than the Mackerras recording in English with Dame Janet Baker; it has the solo voices recorded very close indeed (those that are supposedly off-stage are just about where many modern recordings would have them except when off-stage); and the orchestra sounds, to our re-trained ears, big and thick, with the heavy bass-line that used to seem as proper to Handel as gravy from the roast was to Yorkshire pudding.

The Concerto Copenhagen is Scandinavia’s most renowned Baroque ensemble and one of the most innovative such formations worldwide. Its trademarks are its unusual program combinations featuring Scandinavian rarities and famous Baroque masterpieces. This world-class orchestra now turns to Handel’s great Brockes-Passion in a CD recording based on the Halle edition of this composer’s works. The Passion text published by the well-to-do Hamburg resident Barthold Heinrich Brockes was a literary bestseller during the early eighteenth century.

Latest release on VIVAT brings Mendelssohn’s astonishing reconstruction of Handel’s great oratorio Israel in Egypt. Mendelssohn’s 1833 Düsseldorf performance has been painstakingly reconstructed from fragments and sources across Europe: the large and colourful orchestra, playing nineteenth-century instruments, produces vivid new sonorities, and the double choir sings magnificently. Listeners familiar with Handel’s 1739 version will also find new numbers, significant changes to the order of movements and very different orchestrations.

Ina Siedlaczek and the Lautten Compagney present George Frideric Handel’s Nine German Arias alongside arias from his Brockes Passion. Siedlaczek’s pure and flexible voice is ideally suited to these works; her direct and natural style of singing balances the opulence of the baroque texts. The instrumental sonorities on this recording are characterised by an extraordinarily colourful sound palette both in the melody and the continuo parts: the obbligato instrumental part is taken in turn (even within the same aria) by a flute, oboe and violin and also playing together. In the aria Brich mein Herz, zerfließ in Tränen (track 3), the violin part is played by a viola da gamba, giving this piece an especially personal character.

Praise of the beauty of nature and eternal life are the subjects of the sacred poems by B. H. Brockes which Handel set to music in his "Nine German Arias". In these nine pieces for soprano and a small group of instruments, to be chosen at will, Handel drew in many places on music from his own operas, with the voice part in the German arias adapted to be less virtuosic and more deeply expressive. The "Three German Arias", recorded for the first time on this CD, by Johann Mattheson, which were formerly attributed to Handel, are a real discovery for the repertoire. The soprano Monika Mauch is accompanied in her beautiful interpretation of the arias by the specialist ensemble L'arpa festante.

Handel’s group of nine German arias, composed in London in the mid 1720s, is unique in his vocal output. They are not big display pieces, and they are not excerpts from operas or oratorios. In fact, we don’t know much about the purpose behind their composition. Catriona MacLeod’s excellent notes make a good case for these having been written for private in-home performances, like the trio sonatas with which Chandos fills out this disc. These are significantly more intimate and inward-looking arias than much of Handel’s vocal writing, reflective in nature—and also chamber-like in the musical relationships between voice and instruments.

Handel's "nine German arias" (he wrote other arias in German, but this is a discrete group) were written in the mid-1720s, long after the composer left his native Germany for Italy and then booming Great Britain. It is not known why he should have written music in German at that late date, and the pieces have a quietly contented tone that sets them somewhat apart from almost everything else in Handel's oeuvre. The texts are by Hamburg poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes, whose so-called Brockes-Passion had already been set by Handel a decade earlier.

For decades there has been only one recording of Admeto available: a quite splendid performance from 1977 (Virgin Records 5613692) directed by Alan Curtis with Il complesso barocco. One of the first baroque operas to be recorded with original instruments, it reflects the best of the historical performance movement. It is thus with considerable anticipation and curiosity that one approaches this new release of Handel’s Admeto, sung in English (to a fine translation by Geoffrey Dunn), directed by Sir Anthony Lewis, and recorded just nine years earlier in 1968. The cast for this recording is no less remarkable. Dame Janet Baker plays the self-sacrificing Alcestis; Admetus is sung elegantly and expressively by Maureen Lehane; Sheila Armstong is a brilliant and stylish Antigona, and the mezzo soprano Margaret Lensky provides a touching portrayal of the lovesick Thrasymedes.

Les deux compositeurs choisis, l’un anglais, l’autre allemand, nés tous les deux la même année 1685, sont assurément les représentants majeurs du patrimoine musical baroque. Les œuvres présentes sur ce disque ont toutes été composées à des moments particuliers de leur vie, en marge de leurs commandes habituelles destinés souvent à des personnages de haut rang, et se distinguent par la constante recherche de nouvelles inspirations et styles de composition.

On occasion of the 300th anniversary of the first performance of Handel’s Brockes-Passion in Hamburg (4 April 1719), Accent present a 2017 live performance at the Göttingen Handel Festival with Laurence Cummings conducting the Festivalorchestra Göttingen, the NDR Chor and an excellent cast of singers such as the Dutch soprano Johannette Zomer and the young German tenor Sebastian Kohlhepp (as Evangelist). Barthold Heinrich Brockes’ passion text is one of the most frequently set in the history of music and was the only German text used by George Frideric Handel as the basis for a large-scale sacred composition. The original score was lost but the surviving version, which was hand-copied by Johann Sebastian Bach, makes it possible for us to hear this 1719 oratorio today.

Handel’s music from his early years, in Hamburg and Italy, has a remarkably sure touch, coupled with an exuberant spirit which he seldom matched again.
The Nine German Arias are to texts by Brockes who, preparing a later edition, praised Handel for ‘[setting] them to music in a very special way’. Emma Kirkby expresses with radiant ease and simplicity the confident Pietistic message which runs through them, of God’s goodness reflected in the beauties of nature.

Handel wrote little for his native tongue, but what he did demonstrates a particular level of contemplative piety while still employing the familiar techniques of Italian opera.
Praise for the beauty of nature and eternal life are the subjects of the sacred poems by his contemporary Barthold Heinrich Brockes which Handel set to music in his 'Nine German Arias'. Each aria celebrates an aspect of nature, from the beauty of a flaming rose to the sweetness of silence, with extraordinary tenderness and sincerity.

George Frideric Handel and Hamburg town councillor and poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes were students at the same time in Halle, and it's probable that they knew each other and were perhaps even friends. Brockes wrote a nine-volume anthology, from the first volume of which Handel, between 1724 and 1727, set his Nine German Arias. In translation, the Brockes work is titled "Earthly Delight in God, Consisting of Physical and Moral Poems," the texts reflecting pleasure in the glory of God's natural creation. Handel had been writing opera in England since 1710; the reason behind the composition of these arias, his last works in German, and which were unpublished in his lifetime, remains unknown.

Simone Kermes is a highly idiosyncratic performer who delights in pushing the boundaries of good taste, often unafraid to inject her singing with a grab bag of vocal tricks. So it’s surprising that her latest release is that most standard of offerings, one to put next to your favourite singer’s Verdi or Puccini disc – the Handel recital.

Rodelinda, Regina de' Longobardi was the 7th opera Handel wrote for the Royal Academy of Music founded in 1719. It was premiered at the King's Theater in the Haymarket on February 13, 1725, with great success, as chroniclers report. There were 14 performances in the first season and 8 in each of the revivals in the following season and in 1731, for which Handel revised the work. Thus, it is not surprising that, after nearly 190 years of oblivion, it should have been Rodelinda, now in a German language version and called Rodelinde, which marked the beginning of the 20th century revival of Handel's operas on June 26, 1920, during the Gottingen Handel Festival.