Handel's Queens is a 2019 collection from Signum Classics that offers sparkling selections from Baroque operas, many recorded here for the first time. Yet the prolific Handel is only one of several composers of the era represented on this album, which also includes arias by Carlo Pollarolo, Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicola Porpora, Giuseppe Maria Orlandini, Antonio Vivaldi, Pietro Torri, Leonardo Leo, Giovanni Bononcini, Leonardo Vinci, Attilio Ariosti, and Maurice Greene, all prominent figures of Italian opera and, in many ...
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Handel's Queens is a 2019 collection from Signum Classics that offers sparkling selections from Baroque operas, many recorded here for the first time. Yet the prolific Handel is only one of several composers of the era represented on this album, which also includes arias by Carlo Pollarolo, Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicola Porpora, Giuseppe Maria Orlandini, Antonio Vivaldi, Pietro Torri, Leonardo Leo, Giovanni Bononcini, Leonardo Vinci, Attilio Ariosti, and Maurice Greene, all prominent figures of Italian opera and, in many cases, Handel's rivals. With so many sharing the program, the true focus of the album appears not to be on the composers, but instead on two of the leading virtuoso sopranos of the day, Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, whose musical personae are re-created by sopranos Lucy Crowe and Mary Bevan. Both singers and the album's musical director and harpsichordist, Bridget Cunningham, set the stage for some of the Baroque period's most dazzling vocal pyrotechnics, and convey the feeling...
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