Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Handel: L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Among Handel's English oratorios, the one with the Italian title, L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1740), remains my personal favorite. It is a secular, not a Biblical, oratorio, and it could also be classified as an "ode," like some similar works by Purcell. I have broadcast it three times before, employing three different recordings.

This pastoral ode in three parts was written immediately before the immortal Messiah. The ode reaches that same level of the composer's genius. I think it has been underrepresented in the Handel discography. Handel set the first two parts of the ode to Milton's poetry. The third and concluding part, Il Moderato, is a setting of another verse that isn't on a par with John Milton's sublime "mood" poems. It was Charles Jennens's text throughout that Handel worked from in composing his music for Messiah. Jennens' editing of the Miltonian verse of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso and the Biblical text for Messiah remains right on the mark.

The Erato CD recording of the ode that I broadcast on Sunday, June 26, 1988, with John Eliot Gardiner conducting his own English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, won highest praise from Fanfare, America's leading magazine for reviews of classical music on disc. Another historically informed recorded interpretation of L'Allegro, etc. was released by the budget label Naxos in 2002. The Naxos recording features the Frankfurt Baroque Orchestra and Junge Kantorei chorale, conducted by Joachim Carlos Martini. The Naxos CDs were aired on Sunday, November 13, 2005.

Also favorably reviewed by Fanfare's critic Jerry Dubins is a 2015 Signum CD release which purports to recreate Handel's own performances of 1740. In my broadcasts I have long been in the habit of playing additional recordings of one or another of Handel's concertos for organ, or his Concerti Grossi or the Concerti a due Cori in the intervals (that is the intermissions) between the parts of the oratorios. Such was the practice in Handel's lifetime. The Signum release includes two of the Concerti Grossi Opus 6. One of them is placed up front by way of an overture to the ode--something Handel may or may not have intended. The other is an intermission piece. One of the Opus 7 organ concertos is also inserted into the proceedings. William Whitehead plays organ and carillon. Paul McCreesh directs the period instrument players who accompany the Gabrieli Consort, the baroque choral specialty group that he founded.