Handel: Rinaldo Overture

This CD features Handel arias in 18th century arrangements for recorder and basso continuo. The arias of the ‘newest’ Handel operas were analogous to pop hits and were played in all conceivable arrangements. They were demanding to play and even today require skilled recorder players. Stefan Temmingh has gathered various musician friends and colleagues to revive this fascinating repertoire.

London-based early music group L'Avventura announces the launch of their debut CD, a unique collection of previously unrecorded music by Handel. Fighting the deluge of re-recordings and re-issued CDs in this Handel anniversary year, Opella Nova Records is pleased to present a new group with a completely different take on the venerated composer. The playful, eminently-listenable Handel in the Playhouse is the debut album of new early music ensemble L'Avventura London, directed by Zak Ozmo, based on new musicological research. Consisting mainly of previously unheard English playhouse music composed by Handel, the recording is perfectly timed to coincide with the anniversary of the composer's death. An unusually large number of Handel tunes have been discovered in comic 18th-century musical theatre pieces called ballad operas.Working in London in the 1730s, the authors of these theatre works (which included quality playwrights and writers such as novelist Henry Fielding) cleverly stole Handel's music from his fashionable operas and instrumental works, added new English texts and used them in their own music theatre pieces. The ballad operas, which included (among others) the timeless Beggar's Opera, were staged many hundred times more than even the most successful of Handel's Italian operas. They were performed ceaselessly in London and were huge hits in the provinces for over a century. It was these versions of Handel's music, according to scholars, that were the most well known among British middle-class audiences in the first half of the 18th century. It was also this music that made the composer popular as a national composer, as these very English ballad operas were successes years before Handel's oratorios were fashionable. Handel in the Playhouse is full of new discoveries and the instrumentalists' energetic and sensitive playing brings light to the novel and highly entertaining songs. These little musical gems, played and sung as they would have been performed in the fairs and tiny packed theatres outside London, show the lively and colourful tastes of 18th-century middle-class audiences.The disc also includes a fresh take on movements of the Water Music and the overture from Rinaldo. L'Avventura London has a UK tour planned for Winter 2009-2010. Future releases include a recording of unrecorded 18th-century Portuguese modinhas (sentimental love songs) and related instrumental music, a CD of greatest Baroque hits, Italian instrumental works and a recording of 18th-century Scottish folk songs (all previously unrecorded) in collaboration with a modern Scots folk singer.

Handel's overtures had an independent life almost from their inception and the practice of performing them on keyboard instruments has a similarly long pedigree, beginning with a number of transcriptions made by the composer himself. Keyboard specialist John Kitchen virtuosically evokes Handel's orchestral palette in the welter of timbres and colours which he summons forth from Jacob Kirckman's 1755 harpsichord, a classic instrument from the very apex of the English harpsichord-building tradition.

"His playing is exemplary" Early Music Review, February 2009