Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Ludwig Beethoven's set of 12 variations for piano and cello of Handel's See, the conquering hero comes from Judas Maccabaeus, here in the capable hands of Gautier Capuçon and Frank Braley:

Farewell to Sir Neville Marriner, a very fine conductor indeed, who has died at the ripe old age of 92. Here he is directing the Academy of St Martin in the Fields from the violin in a rapid performance of Handel's The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba from Solomon:

Inspired by this morning's Building a Library on Handel's Alcina, here is Amanda Forsythe accompanied by Apollo's Fire in Tornami a vagheggiar. Sometimes sung by Alcina and sometimes by Morgana, the aria is a declaration of love for Ruggiero.



It's a beautiful performance and Forsythe's embellishments in the da capo section are quite something...

Arriving home in time to catch part of this morning's Building a Library on Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, I was more than a little startled when I turned on the radio to be confronted with Charles Mackerras' large scale modern instrument performance with the LSO in the late 1970s.



Very definitely full-fat Handel...

Here, to contrast with yesterday's post, is Norma Procter singing the same Handel aria, Vorrei vendicarmi from Alcina, with Cappella Coloniensis under Ferdinand Leitner in 1959, at the very start of the historically informed performance movement.

A couple of months ago, I heard a piece of music in the soundtrack of a TV show — the Warehouse 13 episode Queen for a Day — which I liked and thought I recognised but couldn't quite place. I was pretty sure the composer was Handel, I was confident it was a concerto grosso, and I was reasonably certain about the key, but I just couldn't find it among the Opus 6 concerti. Which, it turns out, is no great surprise: the piece was actually the vivace from Opus 3 no. 2 in B-flat major:

And the reason I thought I knew the piece was because I've got Raymond Leppard's recording of the concerti from the early 70s which, somehow, hadn't made it into iTunes when I ripped the matching set of organ concerti with Daniel Chorzempa...

A charmingly old school performance of Handel's organ concerto op. 4 no. 1 with Jeanne Demessieux, Ernest Ansermet and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. The sound is terribly Romantic with lots of strings, a big & beefy concert organ, and slow tempi, but somehow it works.

Spent a lazy day reading my way through Kij Johnson's nebula-winning The Man Who Bridged the Mist and catching up this week's Handelian editions of Composer of the Week before heading into town for tea with the L's, who were passing through on their way back from a day on the coast.

I then spent the evening listening to the proms and dipping into a performance of Susanna I found on YouTube:

According to long hallowed local traditions, overtime cannot be spent anything other than inessential luxuries — largely defined in this context as books and music. Thus, on the strength of the last few weeks of extended working, I've picked up:

• Murry Perahia's recording of Brahms' Handel Variations and Op 118–119
• the Dunedin Concort's recording of Handel's Messiah
• the Alan Curtis et al. recording of Alcina
• the next volume Gardiner's Bach Cantatas

Given that I've also recently bought a the Dunedin's version of Esther, I think it's safe to conclude that I'm going through a rather Handelian phase.

Currently going through a serious Handelian phase, I've been listing to a lot of the operas on YouTube. Today I made it to Alcina and this wonderful performance from Stuttgart in 1999:

There aren't subtitles — not a great loss considering the incomprehensibility of the plot, based on Orlando Furioso — and it's a bit hard to which character is which at the very beginning — and the cross-dressing doesn't exactly help! — but its seriously enjoyable for all that...

ETA: this makes a lot more sense now that I've used wikipedia to mug up on the characters and the (somewhat ludicrous) plot.