Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Italian Cantatas & Arias
Amanda Forsythe (soprano)
Opera Prima / Cristiano Contadin
Italian texts included with English translations
rec. 2023, Villa Bolasco, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy
cpo 555 616-2 [75]

The two cantatas featured as the principal part of this release are among Handel’s most extensive and well known – effectively mini operas for one singer, as they are scored with an instrumental ensemble accompaniment, not just basso continuo. They were written during the period of his Italian travels while he was honing his skills in vocal composition, and they each anticipate an opera which followed shortly afterwards on the same subject.

Agrippina condotta a morire was probably written at Venice in 1709, just before the famous opera about the same figure from Roman imperial history, the mother of Nero. Whereas the opera charts the latter’s ascent to power, the cantata features Agrippina as she rages and vacillates about her son’s deranged desire to put her to death. Amanda Forsythe ably conveys her fury with quite vibrato-laden singing, and in the first two arias some ornamentation of the basic vocal line, an octave higher than written, creates an impression of haughty ire. The roomy acoustic also enhances the character’s imperiousness, providing space in which the sound can reverberate. Yet, under Cristiano Contadin’s direction from the viola da gamba, the ensemble Opera Prima’s accompaniment strikingly counteracts that by pulling the music’s focus back to its more intimate dimensions as a chamber cantata. Forsythe sinks back into purer expressivity for the third aria, ‘Come, o Dio’, generous in tone without vibrato, and there is a dramatically effective, if surprising, close with a recitative, as though quietly sinking into death.

Armida opens more coolly and detached, as befits the fact that the opening recitative is a narration in the third person. Forsythe then changes tack by expressing herself in full vocal colour when voicing the words of the sorceress herself in ‘Ah crudele’, who would reappear in another of the composer’s great operas, Rinaldo. The musical phrases sigh and emote, now that they are grounded by the support of the basso continuo, excluded by Handel from the prelude. There are some outbursts in a later accompanied recitative where vocal tone is not completely controlled, but Forsythe is otherwise quite poised in this cantata. Opera Prima’s one-to-a-part strings don’t quite equal her in dramatic impact – the octaves of ‘Venti, fermate’ surely requiring more passion, but violin and cello handle sensitively the angular melody of the siciliana style aria to conclude, where they maintain an appropriate lilting calm. 

The reverberant acoustic brings an apt bloom to the extracts from the Roman oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno. Full vibrato from Forsythe generally enriches the vocal melody rather than aggravating it, and the strummed accompanying chords of ‘Tu del Ciel ministro eletto’ fall like penitential tears. The famous ‘Lascia la spina’ has almost an upbeat jauntiness, a certain forward drive aided by the improvised runs connecting the disjointed chords in the strings, so that it becomes more tuneful and less of a dirge than it can be in some renditions. 

The affecting performances of the Sinfonia and the Trio Sonata are more than mere palette cleansers and form satisfying intermediate courses in themselves, even if they don’t obviously stem from Handel’s Italian period. The Sinfonia relates to a keyboard suite the composer wrote in his early years in Germany before he visited Italy, even if this arrangement was made later and benefitted from his understanding of Italianate string textures. The fast outer movements positively brim with energy, realising their different characters idiomatically, with bristling semiquavers in the first, and skipping triplets in the final Allegro. The strings’ sweet tone is put to most effective use in the two violins’ tenderly interwoven lines of the Adagio, like a lovesick duet, gorgeously elaborating the music’s basic outline with Corellian suspensions and coloratura that really lifts the written notes off the page.

The Trio Sonata was one of a set assembled years later in London, although it also owes its form to a type of composition that Handel would also have learned from his time in Rome and encounter with Corelli, and its particular musical material to a concerto written by Handel at that time. Opera Prima are again stylish in the yearning and radiant range of expression they give to their performance, but also offering cheer and rhythmic alacrity elsewhere, rather than burdening this delectable chamber music with grand rhetorical gestures. 

Taken together, the selection of works on this disc and their performances offer an alluring overview of that aspect of Handel’s art most inspired by Italy. 

Curtis Rogers

Contents
Armida abbandonata, HWV105 (1707)
Sinfonia in B flat major, HWV339
Agrippina condotta a morire, HWV110 (1709)
Trio Sonata in A major, Op. 5 No. 1, HWV396
Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, HWV46a (1707) – ‘Tu del Ciel ministro eletto’; ‘Un pensiero nemico di pace’; ‘Lascia la spina’

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