Handel: “Admeto, King of Thessaly” / Alan Curtis, René Jacobs, and others

Two sopranos of the “Royal Academy of Music”, Faustina Bordoni (Alceste) and Francesca Cuzzoni (Antigona), were popular at the time, and their enthusiastic audiences were divided into two “hooligans”. Handel must have had a hard time equally distributing the arias to the two rivals. In the end, he had each sing eight arias, and Bordoni, who played Alceste in one aria, sang a duet with Admeto in the other.

This disc was recorded in 1978. American harpsichordist Alan Curtis is best known for his work of Louis Couperin and others on the Alchiv label, but as a conductor he left behind a vast body of Handel operas and oratorios, and this is one of his earliest recordings. Here, René Jacobs, who later turned conductor, is the countertenor and is accompanied by Rachel Yakar, Jill Gomez, Max van Egmond, James Bowman, and others. #baroque #handel #opera #片山俊幸