Beyond Books is a column intended to alert Arts Knoxville readers to interesting music and video materials new to Knox County Public Library’s fabulous Sights & Sounds collection. As our collection of Blu-ray, 4K, and streaming titles continues to grow, we’ll also revisit classics and oddities as they become available in modern formats.
Watch for links or click on the covers: you’ll be invited to connect directly to KCPL’s catalog where you can place items on reserve and have them delivered to your favorite branch … or simply stream them at your convenience.
Handel Arias:
Franco Fagioli with Il Pomo D’Oro
(Deutsche Grammophon, 2018)
Allow me to preface the following bit of subjective hyperbole with the reminder that I have nothing to gain by misleading you. As a humble administrator of your public library’s music collection, I’d simply feel impolite and unprofessional not to make you aware that this recent recording of Handel arias, featuring countertenor soloist Franco Fagioli, is probably the most beautiful new recording of vocal music released so far during this young century.
Born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, George Frideric Handel spent his early working years as a musician, composer, and conductor in the courts and churches of Florence, Rome, Venice, and Naples. Foreseeing the possibility of a brighter career in London, Handel moved there permanently in 1712 and found himself in the midst of a hunger for Italian opera that he was more than happy to satisfy. By the end of the 1730s, though, the expense of producing Italian operas, as well as a waning audience interest in them, led Handel to look to the genre of the sacred oratorio.
Handel is, of course, best known for his greatest hit, circa 1742, Messiah, an oratorio written in English (for Easter, although it has since been commandeered by the modern Christmas industry). Notably, after the success of Messiah, Handel wrote 15 or so more oratorios in English, but never lost his fondness for this inarguable masterpiece.
Handel’s work in English tends toward the martial and mythical. Messiah, for the most part, simply quotes scripture. His Italian ouevre, in comparison, is flagrantly sensual high baroque with lots of ornamentation. Some of the pieces here will be familiar—which will only help you better appreciate the interpretations. With regard to concert music, the term parody means something closer to recycling than satire. Handel, like so many composers, repurposed many of his favorite musical sequences over the course of his career. So you are apt to hear Fagioli singing notes, if not words, that you recall hearing from a soprano or alto in some other setting.
Fagioli’s range and dexterity are almost surreal, and his passion for this material makes the net effect pretty close to magic. Particularly fine are a couple passages from Serse and two pieces from Ariodante. Singing from both operas, Fagioli begins lilting and lamenting and finishes acrobatically, headed for the heavens. Much in demand on stage, Fagioli keeps his head wig- and wardrobe-friendly by wearing no hair of his own. Once you get an impression of his range and stamina for sustain, it’s not difficult to imagine that there may have been a note that cost him his hair. It must also be mentioned that the ensemble accompanying Fagioli, Il Pomo D’Oro under the direction of Zefira Valova, is superlative. They can be seen together online (performing other programs, alas; I’d be delighted to see them make this music) and are well worth a look. It’s interesting to see how much exertion is involved on the part of the singer.
Henry Purcell: ‘The Fairy Queen’
Les Arts Florrisants
(Harmonia Mundi, 1989)
One of the great things about working in a government office is audits and inventories. And one of the great things about working in this particular government office is that instead of Sharpies or flu vaccines, we inventory fabulous music and films. There is a storage area where we keep seldom-borrowed classical items, and inventory recently gave me incentive to flip through it. And there I came upon this exquisite—and out of print—1989 recording of Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, his supremely musical staging of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.
Purcell dominated English baroque in the generation preceding Handel’s, and Purcell’s music was a great influence on Handel. Purcell’s music tends to be complex but accessible. It’s functional in a narrative sort of way, and it would be unusual that you found yourself puzzling over what any particular piece is about. This set would have found me sooner or later. Here is soprano Nancy Argenta, a favorite early-music talent in her prime at age 31. And here is Lynne Dawson, graduate of The Hilliard Ensemble and Deller Consort and the voice that millions associate with Princess Diana, at whose memorial service she sang from Verdi’s Requiem.
You’ve seen plays about plays. Operas about plays are not much different. You know the story—what fools these mortals be—and it’s easy to imagine which scenes are festive and raucous and which scenes maudlin. If you need a reason to borrow this and see what you think for yourself, allow me to recommend beginning with track 12 of disc 2: “The Plaint: O Let Me Weep.” It’s a spectacularly tragic farewell, with Dawson performing the solo. You have a woman’s heart on fire, doing its best to explain why it must soon stop beating.
Dawson’s treatment of the plaint is elegiac, subdued and subtle, probably the way Purcell heard it sung. The library owns a couple other versions well worth hearing, both more robust and virtuosic and much less about surrender. Soprano Lucy Crowe adds a powerful rendition to trumpetist Alison Balsom’s excellent album Sound the Trumpet, a sampler of royal music by Purcell and Handel. (On Sound the Trumpet Balsom plays the “natural,” or pre-valve trumpet. It makes for a much more pleasant accompaniment to the human voice.) The same piece, sung by Jennifer Vyvyan, kind of steals the show, dropped under some somnambulant Pina Bausch choreography, in Pedro Almadovar’s 2002 film Talk to Her.
