Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Handel: La Resurrezione

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

George Frideric Handel's career as a composer really took off in the period in his youth spent sojourning in Italy (1706-08). His patrons in Rome recognized his genius and gave him the breaks he needed to make a name for himself. It was for one of these Roman aristocrats that Handel wrote his first two oratorios, the second of which, La Resurrezione, was given in Rome in concert performance on Easter Sunday of 1708, with a female opera singer as Mary Magdalen, despite the Pope's objection to her participation in a sacred musical drama.

The libretto of this Resurrection oratorio is in the vernacular Italian, not Church Latin. The music is practically identical with the Italian baroque opera seria, only without the staging. There's nothing of the grand choral sound that typifies Handel's later English oratorios. The way La Resurrezione portrays Christ's return on the Third Day is intensely dramatic, also intensely operatic.

Handel's early masterwork was first recorded in 1981 for Decca/L'Oiseau Lyre. Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music accurately reproduces the original instrumentation called for at the premiere performance. This recording in its CD reissue last went over the air on this program on Easter Sunday of 1994. Listen again to the voices of five British singing greats of the later twentieth century: Emma Kirkby, Patrizia Kwella, Carolyn Watkinson, Ian Partridge, and David Thomas. I must thank the Allen Memorial Library of the Hartt School for the second-time loan of this recording for broadcast.