Handel
Total Eclipse: Handel at Home, Vol. 2 – Arias etc (arr. chamber)
London Handel Players
SOMM Recordings SOMMCD0676 75:31 mins
Handel at Home is a sequel to the 2006 original, the brainchild of flautist Rachel Brown. The 2023 project extends the initial concept of turning period arrangements of Handel opera hits into searingly gorgeous instrumental music. Brown and violinist Adrian Butterfield are the only two of the original five players in this new ensemble, whose seven members relish altering Handel numbers even more drastically.
Handel was renowned for re-purposing older music, both his own and others’, so this project’s interventions mine a vein of period practice. Making such creations fizz is no easy task, requiring as it does a three-fold virtuosity in composition, execution and extemporisation, but this recording consistently succeeds. An incandescent presence, Brown deploys her invention, and the particular qualities of the traverse flute – its sensitivity to touch and breath, its audible woodiness, its luminous colours – to create a music wholly her own. One may be very familiar with different renditions of ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, but it is difficult to be prepared for how Brown keeps deepening its expression. Equally fascinating is Butterfield’s one-to-a-part version of Handel’s Sonata 5 in B-flat major (HWV 288); the shading and textures he brings to his line, and the Corellian lashings which he and the others apply to their parts, are their invention. Silas Wollston bends Handel’s harpsichord version of ‘Ombra cara’ into a revelatory excursus: under Wollston’s fingers, the aria becomes an intricately voiced, delicately timed, soul-baring almost-sonata, as if this were the music Handel first imagined before being forced to submit to the exigencies of opera seria.
By restoring the role of composer to its performers, this project shows period practice coming into its own. Berta Joncus
