Handel: Clori, mia bella Cloria HWV 92

Recorded at Fundació Auditori Palau de Congressos, Girona, Spain, May 23-26, 2009

Handel came to Italy as a promising, ambitious young composer bursting with talent, and left it as a mature composer, permanently impregnated with the light and the vocal art of Italy. Some of the great works were written during these significant years in his development (La Resurrezione, Dixit Dominus, Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, Aci, Polifemo e Galatea, Rodrigo…) His cantatas, however, are the great unknowns in his output, within which it is precisely these works that emerge as an important test bed for his music.

Winter & Winter has entrusted this task to a young ensemble, Forma Antiqva, which marks the Munich label's first collaboration with Spanish musicians. The work of the three Zapico brothers with Forma Antiqva inevitably recalls the Kuijkens from Belgium, and in the youngest generation, the Ashby sisters who form part of the excellent group Stile Antico. This first Spanish 'commitment' by Winter & Winter is completed by the participation of the young singer Xavier Sabata: he possesses everything that is needed for these cantatas: clear diction, imagination, passion, engagement and the power of conviction.Thanks to him, the epoch of Spanish 'sopranisti', who enjoyed well-deserved fame throughout Euope, and inspired many to undertake their own personal 'Viaggio in Italia', has made its way back into our consciousness.

Recorded in Saint Michel en Thiérache, France, in June 2007.

Two new voices join Fabio Bonizzoni's project of recording the entirety of the cantatas with instrumental accompaniment which Handel composed when in Italy: sopranos Nuria Rial and Maria Grazia Schiavo enter the company of Roberta Invernizzi, Emanuela Galli, Raffaella Milanesi and Salvo Vitale, the singers who we have been able to hear in the first three volumes of the collection. In this fourth instalment (out of a total of seven CDs planned for release up to the end of 2009), we rediscover the patronage of the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, which lay behind the important cantata a due entitled Aminta e Fillide; this was a work which was to provide the composer with a veritable seam of musical material for use, as 'borrowings', in his operas Agrippina and Rinaldo - one of the reasons perhaps why this cantata has been rarely performed and even less recorded. Both Aminta e Fillide and the extensive cantata for soprano, Clori, mia bella Clori, which rounds off this new disc, had their origins in the special environment of the Accademia degli Arcadi, that literary society founded by a group of aristocrats, cardinals, poets, thinkers and composers in 1690, which used to hold its meetings in idyllic spots around Rome. Karl Böhmer's informed notes contained in the CD booklet suggest a number of stimulating points of view about the meaning and significance of these works for the Arcadians.

The 4th volume of Brilliant Classics’ recordings of Handel’s complete cantatas, performed by Contrasto Armonico and directed by Marco Vitale, gathers together five works that vividly illustrate the composer’s skill at setting the words of his texts, creating hitherto unknown emotional depth and nuance from modest orchestral forces. The musical setting of Clori, mia bella Clori amply displays the genius that would establish Handel as the leading operatic composer of his day, using a range of different combinations of instruments to respond to the subject of each section of the text, from grief and weeping to passionate jealousy. Similarly, in both Pensieri notturni di Filli (Nel dolce dell’oblio) and Lungi n’andò Fileno Handel employs striking dissonance to create a musical counterpart to the despair and suffering of the texts. By contrast, Sans y penser, Handel’s only French cantata, is a comic work, closing with a humorous musical illustration of the singer’s tribute to drinking. Handel composed over 100 secular cantatas during his stay in Italy in the early 1700s. He had several patrons; among the most generous and supportive was the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, and most of the information on the works included on this disc comes from his records. These cantatas reveal the richness of the young composer’s compositional palette, and his ability to depict the content of his texts in such a way that the listener both hears and experiences the emotions of each work. As such, they are an important foreshadowing of his later career as a celebrated operatic composer.

Eight of The Sixteen’s celebrated Handel recordings in one beautiful boxed set edition.

Harry Christophers and The Sixteen have long been celebrated for their recordings and performances of Handel. Over the past three decades Harry Christophers and his award-winning ensemble have expanded their Handel repertoire to take in his greatest works and have performed them to audiences across the globe from the UK, Europe and the Middle East to Australia and Japan. They have also made numerous celebrated recordings of Handel’s masterpieces and this twelve CD boxed set features a selection of some of their finest discs along with three remarkable solo albums featuring The Sixteen’s celebrated orchestra and acclaimed sopranos Sarah Connolly, Ann Murray and Elin Manahan Thomas.