Handel: Piangerò la sorte mia (from Giulio Cesare)

A glittering selection of operatic highlights and arias, featuring great composers and artists who are all celebrating significant anniversaries in 2013.

Crowned with a Grammy Award for her last album, Diva, Divo, Joyce DiDonato joins conductor Alan Curtis and Il complesso barocco for Drama Queens, an electrifying programme of royal arias from the 17th and 18th centuries, composed by figures as famous as Handel and Vivaldi and as little known as Orlandini and Porta. As DiDonato says: “High drama, profound emotion, fearless vocal writing, time-stopping passages, historical significance and real discovery ... What more could I ask for?”

The impact achieved by Joyce DiDonato with her last Virgin Classics album, Diva, Divo, was summed up by her triumph at the 2012 Grammy Awards in February: victor in the Classical Vocal Solo category, the ‘Yankee Diva’ also became the first classical singer to perform live at the Grammy ceremony, receiving a standing ovation for her spectacular rendition of the final rondo from Rossini’s La Cenerentola.

Enterprising as ever, DiDonato now presents a new themed recital, conceived in partnership with Alan Curtis, who also conducted her Virgin Classic recordings of Handel’s Ariodante and Radamisto and her duet recital Amore e Gelosia with Patrizia Ciofi. Drama Queens sees DiDonato portraying a parade of royal personages in a diversity of challenging situations and extreme states of mind.

“For me, this is my most exciting recording project to date,” says Joyce DiDonato,” because it is everything I deeply adore about the world of opera: high drama, profound emotion, fearless vocal writing, time-stopping passages, historical significance and real discovery. What more could I ask for?

“I wanted to return to this genre of music I love so deeply: the free, mysterious, profoundly moving world of Baroque opera, but to do it in the grandest fashion – from the throne of royalty! Each of the characters is a queen (or a sorceress, which equals queen in this fantastical world) ... Well, we have allowed one princess, because the aria is completely unknown and it is simply too beautiful to be left out: ‘Madre diletta, abbracciami’ by Giovanni Porta [c1675-1755].

“What more could a singer ask for than to indulge in the antics of rage and bliss, despair and jubilation, heartbreak and true love?” she continues. “It will be an extraordinary journey, thanks to these larger-than-life characters, and I fully expect to learn a lot about myself along the way.”

Conductor and musicologist Alan Curtis explains that: “Our Drama Queens are a motley group. Our idea was to cultivate extremes, to gather arias that show larger-than-life emotions. They range from noble, but sultry seductiveness, through the hysterically happy to vindictive despair and royal rage. The musical styles are also as varied as possible.”

The arias range in period from the dawn of opera, Monteverdi and Cesti, to lesser-known works by Gluck and Haydn. “We also include some little-known music by Reinhard Keiser [1674-1739], notably an aria with an amazing five-part accompaniment for solo bassoons, without strings,” adds Curtis. (Joyce DiDonato describes it as “an aria of jealousy, suspicion and torment with the bassoon and voice chasing each other.”)

Alan Curtis continues: “Two flashy arias by Giuseppe Orlandini [1676-1760] come from an opera about the great Jewish Queen Berenice, thought to be lost, but found in a California library ... But we have not totally excluded well-known works either. There is Joyce's beloved ‘Sposa son disprezzata’, a YouTube favourite, which most people know in the version for Princess Irene, the rejected bride in Vivaldi's Tamerlano. But it was actually taken by Vivaldi from an earlier opera by Geminiano Giacomelli [1692-1740], where it was sung by a male character and performed by the famous castrato Farinelli. Another Farinelli aria we include comes from an early serenata by Hasse; he sang in drag as one of the greatest drama queens of all time – Cleopatra! And, of course, we include everybody's favourite Cleopatra aria: Handel's ‘Piangerò la sorte mia’, from Giulio Cesare.”

At the Paris Opéra in early 2011, Natalie Dessay takes on a new starring role: Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, now the most popular of all the composer’s stage works. The many facets of the Egyptian queen – captured by Shakespeare in the phrase “infinite variety” – are depicted in a sequence of contrasting arias, both lyrical and brilliant, making the character a superb showcase for the French soprano’s talents as a singing actress.

Conducting the impressive cast and the period-instrument orchestra Le Concert d'Astrée at the Opéra – and on this new recording of excerpts from Giulio Cesare – is Emmanuelle Haïm, who first collaborated with Dessay in the late 1990s; both artists were involved in a Paris production of Handel’s Alcina, Haïm as répétiteur (for William Christie) and Dessay in the sparkling role of Morgana. Since then, the two have developed a close working relationship which has produced a number of Virgin Classics recordings, including several works by Handel: cantatas (in a collection called Delirio), the Dixit Dominus and the oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, a recording which left the French magazine Diapason “looking forward to Emmanuelle Haïm’s next exciting Handelian adventure”.

Dessay describes Haïm as the metteur en scène – the stage director – for her voice, while Haïm describes Dessay’s voice as “an exceptional instrument which can take on a thousand forms ... Its virtuosity and flexibility make you forget all the difficulties presented by the music.” Haïm goes on to say that: “Handel is the composer for the voice. He demands special qualities that Natalie possesses: an ability to create colours, to embody words in song and to let the imagination speak.”

Reviewing Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, Le Monde de la Musique observed that “the virtuosity and rich palette of Le Concert d’Astrée enable Emanuelle Haïm to match the colours and tempo to the emotion expressed”, while the New York Times wrote that: “Ms. Haïm directs the superb Baroque orchestra Le Concert d'Astrée in a fleet, immaculate performance that dances among airy, profound and sensuous moods. The excellent quartet of singers is led by the radiant, bright voice of the soprano Natalie Dessay, whose rapturous Bellezza traverses innocence, defiance and penitence by way of some impressively agile coloratura. ’Tu del ciel ministro eletto', her spare, haunting final aria with plaintive violin accompaniment, is glorious.” In Britain, the The Sunday Times found that “Natalie Dessay dazzles in Beauty’s arias – she is gorgeous in the sublime penitential concluding number … With Haïm conducting with élan, this is the best available version of this glorious score.”

Danielle de Niese's new album Diva, features world premier recording Exsultate, Jubilate by Karl Jenkins, her trademark Handel and Mozart arias, a stunning duet with the mighty Bryn Terfel and Lucretia and Pace Non Trovo both stunning arrangements by Morgan Pochin.

"an irresistible bundle of vocal fizz and sexual charisma" (Financial Times)

“..there’s a charisma that seems to emanate from her voice itself … an extraordinarily powerful and bell-like soprano" (The Independent)

“sexy, witty, compelling – at a level rarely seen on an opera stage” (New Statesman)

Star soprano Simone Kermes has been hailed by Opera News as "The Queen of Baroque.” This CD presents her singing arias by Handel composed for his star soprano Francesca Cuzzoni. The release features two world premiere recordings of the alternate ‘Rodelinda’ arias.

"Kermes's performances give nothing but pleasure." Gramophone