Handel in Rome
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Label: Linn
Cat No: CKD747
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Vocal/Choral
Release Date: 18th October 2024
Contents
Works
Cantata HWV105 'Armida abbandonata'Cantata HWV150 'Ero e Leandro'
Cantata HWV170 'Tra le fiamme'
Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, HWV46a
» Tu del ciel ministro eletto
Artists
Nardus Williams (soprano)Dunedin Consort
Conductor
John ButtWorks
Cantata HWV105 'Armida abbandonata'Cantata HWV150 'Ero e Leandro'
Cantata HWV170 'Tra le fiamme'
Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, HWV46a
» Tu del ciel ministro eletto
Artists
Nardus Williams (soprano)Dunedin Consort
Conductor
John ButtAbout
Handel’s arrival in Rome seems to have had a miraculous influence on his development as a composer. Something about the eternal city ignited the most productive period of his entire career: there Handel worked with some of the greatest musicians of the age and enjoyed the favours of major patrons of the arts. There he also witnessed the clerical aristocracy’s sensual enjoyment of those very luxuries, excesses, and trappings of beauty that they professed to deny in their sermons. In Handel in Rome, Dunedin Consort and its director John Butt set out to convey Handel’s response to this stimulating and somewhat paradoxical environment with three Italian cantatas. Winner of the Rising Talent award at the 2022 International Opera Awards, Nardus Williams is the star soprano.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Ero e Leandro ‘Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio’, HWV 150: 1. Recitativo. Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio
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2Ero e Leandro ‘Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio’, HWV 150: 2. Aria. Empio mare, onde crudeli
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3Ero e Leandro ‘Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio’, HWV 150: 3. Recitativo. Amor, che ascoso ne’ suoi vaghi lumi
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4Ero e Leandro ‘Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio’, HWV 150: 4. Aria. Se la morte non vorrà
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5Ero e Leandro ‘Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio’, HWV 150: 5. Recitativo. Questi dalla mia fronta
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6Ero e Leandro ‘Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio’, HWV 150: 6. Aria. Si muora, si muora
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7Ero e Leandro ‘Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio’, HWV 150: 7. Recitativo. Ecco, gelide labbra
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8Tra le fiamme, HWV 178: 1. Aria. Tra le fiamme tu scherzi per gioco
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9Tra le fiamme, HWV 178: 2. Recitativo. Dedalo già le fortunate penne tessea
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10Tra le fiamme, HWV 178: 3. Aria. Pien di nuovo e bel diletto
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11Tra le fiamme, HWV 178: 5. Aria. Voli per l’aria chi può volare
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12Tra le fiamme, HWV 178: 7. Aria. Tra le fiamme tu scherzi per gioco
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13Armida abbandonata, HWV 105: 1. Accompagnato. Dietro l’orme fugaci del guerrier
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14Armida abbandonata, HWV 105: 2. Ah, crudele! E pur ten vai
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15Armida abbandonata, HWV 105: 4. Accompagnato. O voi, dell’ incostante
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16Armida abbandonata, HWV 105: 5. Aria. Venti, fermate
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17Armida abbandonata, HWV 105: 6. Recitativo. Ma che parlo, che dico?
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18Armida abbandonata, HWV 105: 7. Aria. In tanti affanni miei
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19Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, HWV 46a: Tu del ciel ministro eletto
Europadisc Review
Although much less familiar to most audiences than his mature operas, oratorios and orchestral works, there are good grounds for regarding the music from Handel’s early sojourn in Italy (1707–09) as among his greatest and most vividly energising. The relatively well-known setting of Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus, composed when he was still only in his early 20s, already suggests as much. But to this listener’s ears the pearls of his stay in Rome are the Italian cantatas for one or more voices and small orchestra. In a city where church edict at the time forbade the public performance of opera, these quasi-operatic scenas – very much in the tradition later explored by Haydn and Beethoven – were composed for private performance in the grand residences of princes sacred and secular.
Recordings of these works are still relatively rare, so it’s a pleasure to welcome a new disc of three of the finest solo cantatas from John Butts’s Dunedin Consort – musicians already as familiar with the Handelian idiom as they are with that of Bach. They are joined by the young British soprano Nardus Williams (winner of the Rising Talent at the 2022 International Opera Awards), and the results are grippingly involving. Recorded in a relatively dry-sounding Menuhin Hall (part of the Menuhin School in Surrey), the performances have a sense of focus and intimacy that plays well against the burstingly operatic emotions on display. They also demonstrate how, in these Italian works, the young Handel was rapidly developing the musico-dramatic skills for the full-length operas of his maturity.
The disc opens with Ero e Leandro (‘Qual ti riveggio’), HWV150, probably written for Cardinal Ottoboni in April 1707. It traces Ero’s emotional unravelling, decline and suicide following her beloved Leander’s drowning. Following an arresting opening recitative in which Williams immediately grabs attention with her dramatic tone and authoritative delivery, the first aria sees the heroine raging against the waves that have claimed Leandro. Even at the driving tempo set by Butt, Williams and solo violinist Matthew Truscott are joined at the hip in the fast passagework, while squeezing every bit of emotion out of the pained dissonances in the contrasting central solo section.
The central aria, ‘Se la morte non vorrà’, has a defiant tread and tone, one of the most strikingly compelling numbers in these early cantatas, and here Williams and the Dunedin musicians deliver a performance that is bitingly rhythmic, with a hint of relaxation in the more sparingly-scored central section. By contrast, the final aria, ‘Si muora, si muora’, finds Ero preparing for her own death, and the plangent mournfulness of the music is somehow enhanced by the tight focus of the recording and Williams’s superb tone control throughout her range. The closing recitative – like those between the arias – is a model of dramatic communicativeness, bringing the narrative up short with Ero’s suicide.
Very different in tone is Tra le fiamme, HWV178, which recounts Icarus’s fateful brush with self-powered aviation. Though the myth is a cautionary one, the mood is surprisingly ebullient (enhanced in the opening movement by burbling recorders), as if underlining the folly (specifically, in Butt’s accompanying notes, masculine folly) of Icarus’s hapless endeavour. To this (ironically) uplifting work, Williams brings a wonderfully bright, agile tone: try the second aria, ‘Pien di nuovo e bel diletto’, as the unfortunate youth spreads his wings, cheerfully oblivious to the danger to come. The third aria, with its scurrying viola da gamba obbligato, has a greater sense of peril, as the voice warns ‘let a person fly but with their thoughts’; but the return of the opening aria to close the work (delivered with that judicious ornamentation characteristic of the disc as a whole) ensures that the cantata ends in positive tone, as if we have learnt from Icarus’s misfortune.
The final cantata here is Armida abbandonata, HWV105, composed for Cardinal Ruspoli in June 1707. It opens boldly with solo violin quickly joined by voice in an agitated, angry accompanied recitative (without continuo), before slipping suddenly into the meltingly lamenting tones of the first aria, ‘Ah, crudele! E pur ten vai’ (the voice now accompanied by continuo only). Another accompagnato, featuring tempestuous figuration for the strings, sees Armida urging the stormy seas to drown her departed lover, and the turbulent mood carries over into the following aria, ‘Venti, fermate’, as she now implores the winds to stop in a sudden volte face. Williams’s commanding vocal presence rides out these strong, contrasting emotions, and in the closing aria (cast as a gently rocking sarabande) Armida gains some sort of equilibrium as she urges the god of love to remove her desire for the treacherous hero.
That mood of hard-won equilibrium is further consolidated by the disc’s closing item, the aria ‘Tu del ciel ministro eletto’ from Handel’s early oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. Rarely can an aria renouncing ‘faithless desire and empty passion’ have been set to music of such sensual simplicity. This touching performance, with its gentle, minutely attentive accompaniment, sets the seal on a recording that encompasses a wide range of emotions. And it suggests that, like Handel before her, Nardus Williams is already – at an early age – a musician of enormous accomplishment and talent. For lovers of Baroque music and fine singing, this is an album of pure pleasure.
Reviews
This is effectively a debut recital recording for the soprano Nardus Williams, and she is outstanding. In Ero e Leandro, as Hero confronted with the body of her drowned lover, she pours out grief with a fierce immediacy, her voice giving the impression that it’s about to come unmoored and yet remaining absolutely, thrillingly secure. ... Armida Abbandonata is another study of a conflicted heroine, rivetingly brought to life. Erica JealThe Guardian 25 October 2024
What a pleasure, therefore, to find the soprano Nardus Williams, one of Britain’s young shining stars, sailing through three of Handel’s Italian creations with such thrilling aplomb. ... Some of the instrumental details here are remarkable: there’s a furious viola da gamba accompaniment sufficient to wear fingers to the bone. Nothing, however, obscures the album’s chief glories: Handel himself, as always, and the lustrous firepower of Williams.The Times
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