Handel - La Resurrezione

After The Messiah, Paul Agnew tackles another of George Frideric Handel's major sacred oratorios: La resurrezione. 

Rome, 1708. Nearly two years had passed since the young Handel left his native Germany to settle in Italy, at the heart of the musical and artistic creation of the time. In Catholic Rome, opera was proscribed, as were secular subjects and female voices. But one genre did flourish: the oratorio. The oratorio is a dramatization - but not a stage production! - of allegorical stories and sacred history, as Handel had already done with his highly acclaimed Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, based on a libretto by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili. 

With La Resurrezione, which he wrote for the powerful Marquis Ruspoli, Handel took his Roman apprenticeship a step further, setting to music the most important episode in Catholic liturgy: the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Here was a 23-year-old German Lutheran, come to Rome to excel in a typically Italian musical form, and whose sacred pieces found favor with the very eyes of the Catholic elite, closest to the Vatican... One can only admire Handel's astonishing dexterity. Even more so when the constraints, far from formatting his creation, lead him to produce an astonishingly singular work - such as this Resurrezione, already resolutely Handelian.

To restore the full grandeur of this score, Paul Agnew brings together the full orchestra of Les Arts Florissants and first-rate soloists, emblematic of the “Arts Flo” vocal style.