Handel: Lotario:Alan Curtis(cond)/Il Complesso Barocco/etc

Handel's Lotario (1729) is an opera with several dubious distinctions: it bombed when it was first performed, it bombed when it was revived in the 1950s, and it remained, until 2004, the only Handel opera that had never been recorded. The reasons for these failures aren't hard to find. Even the liner note writer for this release, mystery novelist Donna Leon, concedes that in the opera's story "certain events occur without adequate motivation or, at times, without any motivation whatsoever." Furthermore, it's the kind of work that takes over an hour before things start to get cooking, and audiences by and large have never tolerated that. The lead soprano, Adelaide, doesn't come on-stage for a while and even after that has to wait before stretching her vocal cords -- not in itself terribly unusual, but in place of vocal fireworks from the star the audience gets a sequence of threatening, brooding arias that lay the ground for bloody conflict and murmur about the consuming fire of ambition. This plainly wasn't what Handel's new middle-class audiences wanted to hear. The thing is, there's a lot of first-class music in Lotario, and Handel and everyone else realized it. Individual arias have been excerpted from the work from the composer's time down to ours; for a fine recent example hear Renee Fleming's version of Adelaide's "D'una torbida sorgente" from her disc of Handel arias. In a way, then, this premiere recording of the whole opera, with conductor Alan Curtis leading the orchestra Il Complesso Barocco, offers an ideal introduction: to fit the lengthy opera onto two compact discs, Curtis has trimmed a good deal of recitative and sections of some arias. The result is a sequence of music that's more aria-heavy than most Baroque opera recordings. Excellent vocal contributions come fast and furious from the vocal soloists: soprano Simone Kermes has been charged with using ornamentation that would have been better applied to music a century younger, but she's got the right force-of-nature quality for this music. Female contraltos take the three male countertenor parts of Matilde, Lotario, and the young lover Idelberto, with Sonia Prina plunging enthusiastically into the role of Matilde, the ruthless court wife who is the opera's most fully realized character. Conductor Curtis' handling of the score is exemplary, and Il Complesso Barocco hovers in the background of the singers yet seems fully alive. A nice touch is the inclusion of the original English translation of the libretto, from the program booklet for the work's 1729 London premiere. It's a little confusing at first, especially given the bewildering plot, but you catch on fast.