Opera at home
CDs
ALMIRA
HANDEL
CPO 5555 205-2
This recording of Handel’s very first opera, penned and premiered in Hamburg when he was still a teenager, shows the work to be much more than an interesting curiosity. In the hands of the 33-member Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and its renowned co-directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, along with a brilliant cast, it comes across as a work brimming with inventive and often challenging arias and ensembles, driving recitatives, instrumental dance numbers, and a vaguely predictable story full of intrigue, misunderstandings, marital affairs and rediscovery of a long-lost heir. The recording was made in cooperation with Radio Bremen in 2018, after staged performances that took place in Boston in 2013.
The libretto, based on a fictional text by Giulio Pancieri, sets the tale in the Spanish historical region of Castille, where Almira (Hungarian soprano Emőke Barath), orphaned daughter to the late king, has reached her age of majority and is crowned queen. She names her guardian, Consalvo (German baritone Christian Immler), as her First Counselor, and Fernando (Canadian tenor Colin Balzer), a foreigner of unknown birth, her private secretary. Almira and Fernando are secretly in love but her father’s will demands that she marry one of Consalvo’s sons, namely Osman (American tenor Zachary Wilder), being his only son—or so it is believed, until, surprise surprise, Fernando turns out to be his offspring too. The jealous Osman, who is anxious to gain the throne, is willing to drop his own love, princess Edilia (American soprano Amanda Forsythe) for that chance, which never comes. Oh, and there is another princess, Bellante (soprano Teresa Wakim, another American), who ends up with Osman in the end, while Edilia matches up with Raymondo (American baritone Jesse Blumberg), an ambassador from Mauretania.
Although this is a drama, and a long one at nearly four hours, there is a comic element in the figure of Tabarco (German tenor Jan Kobow), arias, are heard in Pancieri’s original Italian. Their florid, melismatic style makes that language much more appropriate, in fact. Handelians will recognize at least a couple of arias the composer reused later in his career.
