Handel: Oboe Concerto No. 3 in G minor, HWV 287

Organ Concertos Volume 2 from the Passacaille label features Handel’s concertos HWV 295-310. Performed by La Davina Armonia with Paolo Grazzi on Oboe, Lorenzo Ghielmi is both organist and conductor on this recording.

First time on CD

Handel arrived in Hamburg in 1703, aged eighteen. He spent four years in the city and wrote several works for the town’s opera house. Hamburg opera was a rather eclectic beast at the time, drawing on Italian and French language and instrumental style alongside the native German. Handel fell happily into this genre; this recording brings together a selection of the delightful orchestral music (which tends to be in the French style) that Handel wrote there, some of it recorded for the first time.

Winter & Winter's first audio production with the Freitagsakademie and soprano Susanne Rydén presents Handel in Italy, combining his works with compositions by Corelli and Scarlatti. Handel's successful career in England was based on the reputation he gained as a composer and musician during his travels through Italy. At the age of 21 he had already established himself as a successful opera composer in Hamburg, before he journeyed to Italy in late 1706. He passed through Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice where he met and performed with Italy's composer elite: Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Lotti, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti. The Swedish soloist Susanne Rydén is one of Europe's sucessful sopranos specialising in early music. Her love and understanding of the colourful Baroque repertoire has led her to work with internationally acclaimed ensembles and conductors, recent concert seasons having included Bach's Christmas Oratorio with Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in San Fransisco, the St. Matthew Passion with the Nederlandse Bachvereiniging, a programme of Handel with Harry Bicket and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Stockholm, Haydn's Creation with the Kölner Akademie, Handel's Messiah with the Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki, concerts with Lars Ulrik Mortensen and Concerto Copenhagen, Mozart Concert Arias with the Australian Brandenburg Baroque Orchestra and Paul Dyer, and European tours with Emma Kirkby as well as Collegium Vocale and Philippe Herreweghe. Recently she was the soloist at the 2009 Nobel Banquet in Stockholm.

"The Swedish soprano Susanne Rydén captivated her audience. The singer's enchanting presentation of the programme proved an exemplary demonstration of how to keep an audience eating out of one's hands." Goldberg

Handel, a child of his time, was fascinated by the poignant human dramas and emotions exemplified by Greek and Roman classical myths, dramas, and poetry. A theatre composer to his very bones, he devoted himself to the portrayal of human psychology. He had a special interest in those moments when the human psyche is at its most vulnerable: moments of indecision, struggle, despair, fury, abandonment, betrayal, unhappy love, conflict with friends, enemies, and fate, or longing for the oblivion of death.

The oboe was an instrument especially beloved by Händel. It is the unifying element in the anthology of arias and cantatas recorded here.

Bart Schneemann: Handel, that master creator of goosebumps, can juggle emotions with the greatest of ease; he can make you happy, melancholy, resigned, exuberant. A composer who can make two completely different beings, an oboe and a soprano, fall in love, is one of the great ones.

Johannette Zomer: After my first collaboration with Bart (Blake Songs by Vaughan Williams, ccs 18598 ), what struck me was the way our two instruments, oboe and voice, completely fused together. Bart’s way of making music is so pure, so honest, that making music with him in these dialogue-arias raises my singing to a whole new level.