Für Opernproduktionen mit einer grandiosen szenischen Umsetzung ist das der Härtetest: Funktionieren sie auch ohne Optik? Teilt sich ihre Magie auch ohne die bilderwelt, den Erfindungsreichtum des Regisseurs und die Präsenz der Sänger mit?
Kein Problem im Falle des Münchner 'Ariodante'. Der CD-Mitschnitt, quasi der "Soundtrack" aus der Aufführungsserie im Januar 2000, ist ein Glücksfall fürs Händel-Repertoire. Zumal auch die Tontechniker die Live-Atmosphäre eingefangen und eine nahezu perfekte Balance zwischen Bühne und Graben hergestellt haben. …

Ann Murray is one of the leading mezzo-sopranos on the international scene. (She is not related to the famous Canadian popular music singer with a similar name.) The Irish-born singer was educated at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where she studied with Frederic Cox. She bases her career in London, where she sings regularly at the English National Opera and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. With the former she has sung Charlotte, Rosina, Beatrice, Xerxes, and Ariodante.

This disc, very well recorded in 1984, presents the Fireworks music on period instruments but in the version that includes the strings. Pinnock later recorded the version that used a large wind band. The rest of this disc features two concertos for two horns which prove to be thoroughly entertaining.

Julie Roset, a young French soprano from Avignon, immediately attracted attention with her first recital for Ricercar (Nun danket alle Gott with Clematis) and went on to record a recital of works by Sigismondo d'India with Mariana Flores that met with great critical acclaim. In this new recording she tackles several of Handel's masterpieces on religious themes: his Salve Regina, Gloria and the motet Silete venti were all composed at the time when the young Handel had been inspired to new heights by his discovery of Roman musical life.

Belshazzar is one of Handel’s works that could be called a total failure at the time of its first performance. Premiered in 1745 to a nearly empty house, contemporary reports say that it was a disastrously bad performance. This oratorio never gained popularity in Handel’s lifetime, and he only performed it twice after the first performance. Yet this is no minor work. Full of great Handelian arias, and stirring choral movements, this oratorio deserves to stand among his greatest works. Drama and energy play like a flame through the pages of this work. It has everything a Handel oratorio needs: tension, excitement, and attractive melodies.

Recorded in 1995, this Esther was first issued as Collins Classics 7040-2 early the following year. Like Hogwood, Harry Christophers recorded the original 1718 version of what has gone down in history as Handel’s first English oratorio.
In point of fact, the complex and still largely unresolved history of Esther suggests that it was not originally composed as an oratorio at all, but rather as a staged work that would have formed a companion to the near-contemporary Acis and Galatea.

''Siroe'' (1728), the Italian opera that the huge popularity of ''The Beggar`s Opera'' drove from the London stage (and nearly ruined poor Handel), is hardly less fascinating. The plot resembles that of ''King Lear'' and is buoyed along by some of the most subtle and varied music Handel ever wrote for the theater. Again, the realization by members of Palmer`s ''stock company''

Handel wrote incidental music for only one play, Tobias Smollett's Alceste, and it was never produced, so the composer, characteristically, recycled most of its major numbers. In this recording, Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company deliver a distinguished account of the rarely performed or recorded complete score. Written in 1750, late in Handel's career, it is clearly the work of the composer at the height of his powers, and many of its numbers deserve broader exposure. The soprano aria "Gentle Morpheus" is easily among the loveliest the composer ever wrote, and Lucy Crowe sings it with ravishing sensuality. Crowe's luminous singing in her three arias is one of the highlights of the album. Tenor Benjamin Hulett, whose part is given the bulk of the solos, performs with agility and lightness.

One of Handel’s more epic Italianate psalm-cantatas, Dixit Dominus (1707) was composed for the name day of the Spanish King Felipe V, and it has a strongly Venetian character in its dispersion of voices and instrumental effects. Highly chromatic and vocally acrobatic, the writing for high sopranos is in bravura style, especially in the wild opening to Dominus a dextris tuis, in which singers extol The Lord for the ubiquity of His wrath.

Most of the Handel pieces on this release are "hidden" in that if you go to the editions of the operas from which they are taken, you won't find them. Many of them were "insertion arias," written for revivals of Handel operas where the new singers wanted something tailor made. Two were written for insertion into the opera of someone else, namely Alessandro Scarlatti, and there are several miscellaneous rarities and rather odd instrumental pieces for interludes. It might sound like an excursion into the dustier corners of the Handel repertory on the part of the historical-instrument group Il Complesso Barocco and their conductor Alan Curtis, who has been at this kind of thing since most of the current crop of Baroque opera conductors were toddlers and who presumably has earned the right to do what he wants.

Laurence Cummings leads the FestspielOrchester Gottingen and a cast of superb soloists in a performance of Handel's opera Faramondo. The work was first performed in London in 1738. There were only eight performances and it was never revived during the composer's lifetime. The first modern production was in Halle in 1976, and several recordings have been made. Its convoluted plot is a story of revenge, intrigues, love and jealousy, backed by some of Handel's most sublime music.

Because authentic Baroque performance practices have become so widely accepted, the appearance of Bernard Labadie's excellent 2007 recording of George Frideric Handel's Water Music might not seem exceptional; the use of period instruments by his superb chamber ensemble, Les Violons du Roy, might not seem extraordinary to anyone who has heard recordings of eighteenth century music since the 1980s.

Handel’s spectacular oratorio Belshazzar was composed in 1744, from a libretto by Charles Jennens that describes the fall of Babylon. Less successful in it’s day than the popular Italian opera, Belshazzar is a work on an imposing scale — dramatic, passionate, full of stirring choruses and solos, and a piece which Handel himself described as ‘very grand and uncommon’. The oratorio is full of invention, energy and drama with the Jewish, Babylonian Persian and Medes masses having their own distinctive musical styles that were juxtaposed to create a tense dramatic conflict. Composed in the same year as the splendid Hercules the two oratorios represent the peak of Handel’s dramatic writing. Belshazzar was a failure at the time of its first performance in 1745—contemporary reports speak of a disastrously bad performance—and the oratorio never gained popularity in Handel’s lifetime.

The composition is a tour de force, written by Handel at the age of 22 to showcase his skill in choral music – which this recording certainly does. Outstanding historically informed performance led by Simon Preston. Of particular note: an inspired rendering of the soprano duet "De Torrente" by Diana Montague and the legendary Arleen Augér.

Much has been said and written about Handel and Metastasio, and the composer’s supposed lack of interest in the librettos of the famous Roman poet. The fact is that Handel generally used adaptations of much older librettos which perhaps represented a bigger space of liberty for its work and conception of drama. Though Handel set to music only three librettos by Metastasio (Siroe, Poro and Ezio), we can hardly doubt he knew and recognised the qualities of their dramaturgy. Two of the three were successful and all of them gave him opportunity to write beautiful music.