Lorenzo Regazzo

Using the critical edition by Azio Corghi, this recording of L’Italiana in Algeri was made at a jubilee performance of the XXth Rossini in Wildbad Festival in 2008.

For his tenth opera, the already celebrated 21-year-old Rossini wanted ‘a humorous libretto full of spectacle’.

This spirited opera, completed in barely a month, scored an immediate hit and its manic atmosphere of ‘organized, total lunacy’, as Stendhal put it, has ensured its enduring popularity.

World-renowned bass, Lorenzo Regazzo, one of the finest singers of his generation, performs a recital of Handel operatic arias accompanied by Concerto Italiano under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini.

Two musical titans in the classical world, award-winning Italian bass Lorenzo Regazzo and Italian conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini, both major Naïve artists, are brought together once again to record the greatest operatic arias by George Frederic Handel. Handel, one of the most celebrated operatic composers of the eighteenth century, always remained out of step with the preferences of his era – notably his attachment to the ‘natural’ male voice in a time when the high voices of women or castratos triumphed everywhere. The programme on this release, covering thirty years of Handelian repertory, beautifully illustrates the way Handel wrote for the bass voice, and demonstrates how he required singers in this register to perform feats immeasurably more challenging than those called for by other continental composers of the period. Lorenzo Regazzo also presents in this programme a mini artist portrait of the bass Giuseppe Maria Boschi, creator of the role of Pallante in Agrippina, and who was to take part in some fifteen London premieres, from Rinaldo (1711) to Tolomeo (1728).

Rossini’s ‘rescue opera’ L’inganno felice (The Happy Deception) won immediate contemporary popularity after its first performance in 1812. One of the composer’s most inventive and sparkling scores, with soprano, tenor and bass arias of great beauty, it is today by far the least well-known and least often performed of his five farces written for Venice. The drama concerns the attempt of Isabella, wrongly rejected by her husband the Duke, and her protector, the miner Tarabotto to bring to justice the Duke’s villainous confidant Ormondo and his henchman Batone, and to reconcile Isabella with her husband. The end is happily achieved, the guilty punished and the innocent triumphant.

Rossini’s Mose in Egitto, decribed as an azione tragico-sacra, combines the biblical narrative of the release of Moses and the Israelites from Egypt, and a more characteristically operatic element in the love of Pharaoh’s son Osiride for the Hebrew girl Elcia, making this also a typical conflict between love and duty. The piece was reworked in 1822 for Paris with new arias, but is given here in the slightly revised Italian version of 1819, which includes the famous Act 3 Preghiera of Moses.