CDs
ALMIRA
HANDEL
CPO 5555 205-2
This recording of Handel’s very first opera, penned and premiered in Hamburg when he was still a teenager, shows the work to be much more than an interesting curiosity. In the hands of the 33-member Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and its renowned co-directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, along with a brilliant cast, it comes across as a work brimming with inventive and often challenging arias and ensembles, driving recitatives, instrumental dance numbers, and a vaguely predictable story full of intrigue, misunderstandings, marital affairs and rediscovery of a long-lost heir. The recording was made in cooperation with Radio Bremen in 2018, after staged performances that took place in Boston in 2013.
The libretto, based on a fictional text by Giulio Pancieri, sets the…
