The idea of performing and recording Handel's music with a focus on the singers who performed it originally is not new, but this release from soprano Ruby Hughes has several novel features. First is that the Handelian prima donna involved, Giulia Frasi, is not one who has been much examined before. She moved to London around 1740 and impressed Handel, who chose her for the premieres of his later oratorios (although not Messiah). Second, Frasi's career continued well after Handel's wound down, and Hughes and the Orchestra of ...
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The idea of performing and recording Handel's music with a focus on the singers who performed it originally is not new, but this release from soprano Ruby Hughes has several novel features. First is that the Handelian prima donna involved, Giulia Frasi, is not one who has been much examined before. She moved to London around 1740 and impressed Handel, who chose her for the premieres of his later oratorios (although not Messiah). Second, Frasi's career continued well after Handel's wound down, and Hughes and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Laurence Cummings cover its later phases here, in the process unearthing some quite rare music from England in the middle and later 18th century. For many listeners these will be the highlights, especially the oratorio excerpts of John Christopher Smith (Paradise Lost, 1760, and Rebecca, 1761). Smith, Thomas Arne, and Vincenzo Ciampi certainly labored under Handel's shadow, but sample the substantial selection from Philip Hayes' masque Telemachus,...
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