Magdalena Kožená et al; Les Musiciens du Louvre/Marc Minkowski
Pentatone PTC 5187 084 192:25 mins (3 discs)
Predatory Alcina has fallen in love with Ruggiero, and has detained him on her enchanted island. Blinded by obsession, he doesn’t know the danger which awaits him when she tires of her infatuation, because she turns her discarded lovers into trees and wild beasts. Ruggiero’s jilted partner Bradamante arrives (cross-dressed and disguised as ‘Riccardo’) to rescue him. But she too is in danger, because Alcina’s randy and imperious sister Morgana fancies ‘Riccardo’, and has sacked her lover Oronte…
Despite the complexity of its plot, Alcina was a runaway success, but much of its original appeal would have lain in the spectacle. Here, we have to make do with the sound alone, but Marc Minkowski and his singers and instrumentalists have woven such a wonderful spell that no listener could feel short-changed. The orchestra plays with fastidious attention to Handel’s ever-changing palette, and its support for the singers – particularly with the obbligatos – is unfailingly sensitive.
And the singers are top-notch. Originally the ‘lost boy’, Oberto was sung by a celebrated treble, but the countertenor Alois Mühlbacher is sweetly moving in Oberto’s search for his father. In the soubrette role, Erin Morley is vocally dazzling as the opportunistic Morgana, while mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong’s Bradamante gravely grounds the action.
The moments of greatest beauty belong – as if by right – to contralto Anna Bonitatibus as Ruggiero and Magdalena Kožená in the title role. Bonitatibus’s delivery of ‘Verdi prati’ – a farewell to youth and beauty – is as arresting as could be desired. Kožená, meanwhile, runs the gamut of regal emotion – light and girlish, then plangently despairing, and finally accepting defeat with grace – with a gloriously elegant tone, and with a coloratura perfectly measured even at the heights of passion.