Handel: Rinaldo (CD)

Gramophone “Editor’s Choice” Award 2001
Five out of Five stars, BBC Music Magazine

“…the casting of Gerald Finley was a stroke of genius.” Gramophone
“No less impressive [is] Gerald Finley, who manages to make the blustering Argante into a flesh-and-blood character.” Rough Guide to Opera

Composer: George Frideric Handel
Conductor: Christopher Hogwood
Performers:

Goffredo: Bernarda Fink
Rinaldo: David Daniels
Almirena: Cecilia Bartoli
Argante: Gerald Finley
Armida: Luba Orgonasova
Chrsitian sorcerer: Bejun Mehta
Eustazio: Daniel Taylor
A herald: Mark Padmore
A woman: Ana-María Rincón
Two sirens: Catherine Bott, Ana-María Rincón
Academy of Ancient Music

Recorded: Henry Wood Hall, London, 19-27 November 1999
Released: October 10, 2000
Number of Discs: 3
Label: Decca (467 087-2)
ASIN: B00006YYJ1

Photos from the recording session
(CD booklet)

What the critics say

From The Rough Guide to Opera, 3^rd edition, Matthew Boyden, 2002

Of the three recordings of Rinaldo to appear in the last thirty years, this is the best by a wide margin. Christopher Hogwood is a veteran Handel conductor and, although he rarely ventures into opera, his unerring sense of pace and phrasing means that there is always a strong whiff of theatre to this performance. He is helped by a starry cast who really deliver the goods. Counter-tenor David Daniels, who takes the title role,is a compelling presence – equally at home in the virtuosic arias as he is the lyrical ones. He is matched by Cecilia Bartoli who gives a hugely committed performance as Almirena, wringing every inch of pathos from “Lascia ch’io pianga”. No less impressive are Gerald Finley, who manages to make the blustering Argante into a flesh-and-blood character, and Bernarda Fink who brings enormous dignity to Goffredo. The one slight reservation is the close miking of the singers which creates an artificial immediacy that undermines the sense of a real performance.

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Andrew Clements applauds Cecilia Bartoli’s seductiveness and savagery. The Guardian, 24 November 2000

Larger than life

Premiered in 1711, Rinaldo was the first opera that Handel wrote specifically for the London stage, just a few months after his arrival from Hanover. Though typically he recycled some of the music from his earlier works, he clearly relished the extra dimension of grandeur and spectacle that he could exploit from the forces and stage machinery of the London theatre, and the music is more daring and varied orchestrally than he had written before. The libretto too, taken at one remove from a story by Tasso, requires all manner of supernumeraries – spirits, fairies and soldiers – for this tale of heroism and enchantment set among the forces camped outside Jerusalem during the crusades.

Before it went into the recording studio, Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music had taken their performance of Rinaldo around the concert halls of Europe. The cast changed during the tour, but Cecilia Bartoli was a constant ingredient, and predictably her contribution is one of the great assets of the discs too. She delights in the coloratura that Handel gives the character of Almirena, and invests her greatest aria, the ineffably moving “Lascio ch’io pianga”, with the dignity and emotional profundity of a great tragic heroine. But David Daniels in the title role is her equal in his technical command and dramatic presence, while Bernarda Fink as Goffredo, the leader of the Crusaders, Luba Organosova as the Queen of Damascus, the enchantress Armida, and Gerald Finley as the infidel king Argante all produce stylish performances of wonderful presence and character.

The only shortcomings of this vocally outstanding set are the conducting and the orchestral playing. Hogwood is an inflexible, unresponsive partner for singers of this subtlety and intelligence. Though his brisk tempi keep the opera moving along, the recitative never goes with the conversational naturalness it really needs, and the Academy of Ancient Music still cultivates an undernourished period-instrument sound, which seems to hark back to the early days of the movement rather than the fuller textures that have become the norm.

Patrick Giles from Opera News

George Frideric Handel first won the attention of the London public in 1711, with the premiere of Rinaldo, an adaptation of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata, at the Queen’s Theatre. Across the centuries, it’s easy to understand why. The twenty-six-year old composer combined an already masterful technique with a rich, invigorating musical imagination. Rinaldo is a young composer’s opera, more dazzling than moving, with characters who are attractive but less convincing than those of later Handel creations. Christopher Hogwood and the performers on this new Decca Rinaldo realize the opera by emphasizing its successes and not lingering over its shortcomings.

When a character does pause to ruminate or declaim, Hogwood encourages the singer to lavish time and feeling on the moment. At its best — as in the opera’s most famous arias, Almirena’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” and Rinaldo’s “Cara sposa” — Rinaldo reveals Handel’s unmistakable ardor, an ardor as commanding as Wagner’s or Verdi’s. Hogwood also allows Rinaldo’s kitschier moments to work their charm, as when the hero is accosted by sirens and an evil spirit in Act II. As in his finest Handel recordings — an exquisite Messiah and the Athalia with Joan Sutherland (both on L’Oiseau Lyre) — Hogwood forsakes his sometimes rigid musical approach to communicate the sensuous and aesthetic magic of Handel. The conductor even unbends enough to dub in actual birdsong during Almirena’s Act I “Augelletti che cantate,” in a charming bow to opera history. (Real sparrows were let loose during this aria at Rinaldo’s premiere, causing much amazement; Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s tart “reviews” of those winged debutants are included in the CD booklet’s notes.) There are still moments when this music could sound more startling, with less emphasis on precision; but on the whole Hogwood’s is a stirring account of the opera, one that Baroque opera novices should find particularly enticing.

The first Rinaldo cast was a gallery of virtuosos: castrato stars Nicolo Grimaldi (Rinaldo) and Valentino Urbani (Eustazio), bass Giuseppe Boschi (Argante) and prima donnas Elisabetta Pilotti-Schiavonetti (Armida), Isabella Girardeau (Almirena) and Francesca Vanini-Boschi (Goffredo). Handel demands a broader range of vocal ability and emotional generosity than any other composer of his day, and the singers on this recording largely meet those challenges. In her first recording of a Handel opera, Cecilia Bartoli (Almirena) demonstrates that she could become an important singer of this repertory. Her big arias are beguilingly sung, although her “Lascia ch’io pianga” lacks the deep, cantabile melancholy that several earlier Handelians have brought to the aria, and her faster singing sounds more like a tour de force than a triumph, a sprint that is probably meant to suggest passion but occasionally sounds just rushed. Gerald Finley and Luba Orgonasova are witty and malicious as Argante and Armida, equally effective when sorcery fails to heal the ache in their hearts. (Orgonasova’s singing after Rinaldo spurns Armida descends to just the right depth of despair.) Countertenors Daniel Taylor (Eustazio) and Bejun Mehta (Mago Cristiano) are very fine. The orchestral playing throughout is spirited, at times thrilling.

Since this performance was recorded, in November 1999, David Daniels has played Rinaldo onstage in two productions, to considerable praise. Despite his many virtues, quibbles over the relatively recent fashion for using countertenors to sing Handel’s most dramatic roles will not be settled by this recording. Neither Daniels nor any other countertenor can match the depth of color female Handelians have brought to Rinaldo’s martial “Or la tromba.” (Only one high-voiced male part in this Rinaldo is sung by a woman, as it was at the opera’s premiere: Bernarda Fink’s Goffredo, which offers warmth and handsome tone, especially in her last-act aria.) But Daniels here demonstrates considerably greater power and authority than were evident in his performances even two or three seasons ago. His “Cara sposa” is meltingly voiced and tenderly expressed; his accomplished Act I finale, “Venti, turbini,” begs for multiple replays. Daniels’s growing ability to structure a role is audible, and he and Bartoli sing beautifully together.

It is encouraging to note that Decca, which forty years ago positioned its great new star Joan Sutherland as the centerpiece of several Baroque and bel canto rediscoveries, has now applied the same initiative and care to Cecilia Bartoli and Rinaldo. One hopes this will be the first of many Handel recordings that the label and its current diva present to a new generation of listeners.

Gramophone “Editor’s Choice” Award 2001

James Jolly, Gramophone

Handelians are living enchanted lives at the moment. The list of his operas still to be recorded is shrinking almost by the month, and the standard of performance of those works is comparably going up.

Why? The answer is simple, Handel was a master of his craft, a composer who knew not only how to write wonderfully for the voice but also how to write music that singers love to perform.

Decca’s recording of Rinaldo, in its original version from 1711, has been cast with a line-up that you’d usually only expect to encounter in one of those ‘dream cast’ competitions. In the title-role, David Daniels once again confirms his status as a countertenor of supreme style blessed with a voice of great beauty.

Cecilia Bartoli, too, demonstrates that this is not only her repertoire of choice but also of nature – what a luxury to hear ‘Lascio ch’io pianga’ sung by such a lovely voice but also to have it set in the context of the entire work.

Bernarda Fink, as Goffredo, sings superbly and the casting of Gerald Finley, too, was a stroke of genius. There may have been more dramatic gestures in this music from ‘the pit’. But there’s no doubting Christopher Hogwood’s innate feeling for this music. A triumph.

John Rockwell, New York Times, 31 August 2003

Ye Olde Handel Dusted Off by an Iconoclast

SO now we have two recent, spiffily recorded,starrily cast recordings of one of Handel’s most spectacular scores, the opera ”Rinaldo.” Each uses period instruments and occupies three CD’s, and although the choice between them is not easy, I prefer the more recent set, conducted by René Jacobs. But what really interest me are the differences — differences in singing, conducting and philosophy — and how they may have sparked the sharply divided critical response the Jacobs set has received.

Recorded last summer and released by Harmonia Mundi France, it features Vivica Genaux, a mezzo-soprano, as Rinaldo; Lawrence Zazzo, a wonderful countertenor, as Goffredo; and Miah Persson, another mezzo, as Almirena. Inga Kalna and Dominique Visse fill out the cast, and Mr. Jacobs conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.

The other version offers the Academy of Ancient Music conducted by Christopher Hogwood. Recorded in 1999 and released by Decca, it reverses two voice types: David Daniels, a countertenor, sings Rinaldo, and Bernarda Fink, a mezzo-soprano, Goffredo. Otherwise, the vocal registers are the same, with Cecilia Bartoli as Almirena, Luba Orgonasova and Bejun Mehta.

It is hard to choose between the casts. Ms. Bartoli has a special vocal personality, but Ms. Persson is terrific. I prefer Ms. Genaux’s smoky mezzo (and impassioned delivery) to Mr. Daniels’s countertenor. Otherwise, it’s pretty equal and pretty fine.

The big difference — and it is a huge one, the one that has caused all the controversy — lies in the conducting and in the resultant instrumental sound. In, say, modern orchestral performances of a Brahms symphony, interpretive differences outweigh the sheer sonic aspects. But in early music, the conductor plays a major role in determining the actual sound of the instrumentation.

Mr. Hogwood has been widely criticized over the years for, consciously and unconsciously, taking such a neutral interpretive position that the music just seems to play itself, blank and uninflected. That’s not quite the case here. His ”Rinaldo” sounds like ye olde English Handel: string-driven, stately, jolly, comfortable.

Mr. Jacobs, by contrast, is an interventionist. If he sees an opportunity to trick up a simple line with an added piccolo or a sound effect (thunder, echo) or even to interpolate music by other composers, he grabs it gleefully. His is a ”Rinaldo” with extreme, sometimes eccentric tempos, wild coloration and a beefed-up, multihued continuo section.

But there’s more. Mr. Jacobs seems to feel, here at least, that in the absence of a stage or video production, he should provide dramatic sound effects to suggest what might otherwise be conveyed by scenic means. This is an opera set in the crusades, with knights and maidens and confused amorous entanglements. It is also a magic opera, representing a genre popular in Handel’s day, with ample opportunities for spectacular stage effects. Mr. Jacobs wants us, confined at home with our audio recordings, to hear the magic.

He loads up the already insanely virtuosic harpsichord solo in Armida’s aria that ends Act II with all manner of flourishes and interpolations and even an extra harpsichord. After you hear Mr. Jacobs’s version of the Sirens’ aria from Act II with castanets, Mr. Hogwood’s account, without them, sounds unimaginatively plain.

”This is not cheap showmanship if the conductor and his partners play the effects game to the hilt,” Mr. Jacobs argues in booklet notes.

This approach has engendered hearty enthusiasm from some critics, me among them. It sounds impassioned, lively, outrageous and silly, all in the best sense. ”Jacobs brings the opera so vividly to life that it seems to leap from the speakers, excesses or not,” Robert Levine writes on ClassicsToday.com. ”And what’s wrong with extra continuo, ornaments galore and very dramatic singing if it all remains faithful to Handel and keeps us entertained?”

But faithful to whose Handel? It sounds like cheap showmanship to some. What seems merely plain to me seems noble and properly self-effacing to others. Especially, it seems, to British critics; several have laced into the Jacobs recording as intrusive and annoying. They prefer their Handel straightforward and honest and unfussy — the way, one suspects, they heard him in the 1960′s and 50′s or even earlier.

The most notable of those critics has been Stanley Sadie, a Handel authority and the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, who reviewed the Jacobs set in Gramophone.

”Unless you prefer the ‘effects game’ of the new version,” Mr. Sadie wrote, ”I am sure you will find the much more direct and more stylish approach of the Hogwood set better attuned to Handel and this early masterpiece.”

Of course, no one can win this argument. Taste is taste, and despite Mr. Sadie’s calm assurance that Mr. Hogwood stands closer to Handel than Mr. Jacobs does, one can’t be so sure. Mr. Jacobs, operating from his instincts as a modern-day performer just the way Mr. Hogwood does, freights his explanatory notes with evocations of what he is sure Handel would have wanted.

Taste is shaped as much by listening experience and national musical culture as by scholarship or individual personality. I can’t speak for the formation of Mr. Sadie’s taste in matters Handelian. But the Hogwood approach to ”Rinaldo” harks back to Eduard van Beinum’s wonderfully steady ”Water Music” with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the stately Handel of the Coronation Anthems and performances by Adrian Boult. The opera here marches grandly forward, a precursor of Elgar’s ”Pomp and Circumstance,” full of the confidence of empire.

Mr. Sadie writes of the Jacobs approach that ”this kind of rough and explosive sound . . . is surely alien to the refined and elegant age to which the music belongs.”

Mr. Jacobs is Flemish, a singer himself (a countertenor), an excitable Belgian fueled, one might speculate, by the New European optimism and sense of possibility that countries on the Continent seem to feel more strongly than the British. Or at least the older British.

And where do innocent Americans stand amid this cross-fire? Some will prefer the Hogwood set, for its singers and its understatement. Others will flock to the Jacobs, for its musical and intellectual fireworks. A simple (if costly) solution, not so much weaselly as wise, would be to have both.

BBC Music Magazine

Performance: 5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 5 out of 5 stars

For those who flocked to hear Bartoli sing in Rinaldo with the Academy of Ancient Music last year, this recording more than lives up to the live performance. Boasting a uniformly excellent cast – David Daniels on peak form as Rinaldo, Bartoli as an Almirena of vivid immediacy, a powerful Argante in Gerald Finley – and the AAM on bristling form, this disc is without doubt the new benchmark. One only has to compare it with its only current rival, the hearty but rhythmically slack rendering under Jean-Claude Malgoire (Sony, 1977) to appreciate the achievement. The recorded sound is close and well-balanced for a start, even if Bartoli’s breath is sometimes down one’s neck. She brings a profound pathos to the role of Almirena, and her way of lingering and withdrawing sound in her arias on the subject of threatened love are most affecting. Beside her, Ileana Cotrubas’s Almirena on Sony revels in the delectable melodies, but lends nothing of Bartoli’s urgency to the meaning of the words. The same can be said of Finley’s Argante: he attacks the aria ‘Basta, che sol tu chieda’ with passionate vigour, while Ulrik Cold (Sony) sings very nicely indeed but fails to communicate. Above all, this recording returns to Handel’s original intentions of having Almirena and Armida played by women and Rinaldo and Goffredo as two castrati (here countertenor) voices. In the delightful love duet among the birds in Act I, Daniels and Bartoli tumble over each other with excitement, the jewel-like brightness of the latter a brilliant match to the plangent sweetness of the former. If their engagement in the drama is consummate, so is Hogwood’s – the orchestra races headlong during the storm and provides a wonderfully keen accompaniment to Rinaldo’s lament that follows. Moreover, instead of the appallingly-tuned ‘birdsong’ of the flutes in the Sony version, Hogwood provides real birdsong underneath a finely pitched recorder consort. Luba Orgonasova as Armida seduces with a blend of fragility and determination, while Bernarda Fink is a lusty Goffredo. A welcome return for Handel’s first Londonopera.