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Handel - Italian Cantatas Vol.7 - Apollo e Dafne 

Sadly, even exceptionally good things must come to an end: La Risonanza has reached the seventh and final instalment in its endeavour to research, perform and record all of Handel’s youthful cantate con strumenti composed in Italy. The series has reconfirmed the genius of a composer who was only in his early twenties when he arrived in Rome in 1706, and whom harpsichordist Fabio Bonizzoni half-jokes was surely as much half-Italian as he was German-born and a naturalised British citizen. This programme’s title “Le ultime Cantate Italiane” does not refer to the chronology of the compositions featured, but signifies the disc’s crowning position at the completion of Glossa’s beautifully presented project. Carlo Vitali points out in his erudite note that all three featured cantatas – including two of Handel’s very best – have varying degrees of connections with Naples. Cuopre talvolta il cielo seems to have been written in about summer 1708 for the same bass who sang Polifemo in Handel’s Neapolitan wedding serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, and it is possible that the melodramatic soprano cantata Agrippina condotta a morire originated in the same aristocratic circle. The lovely masterpiece Apollo e Dafne has a couple of numbers that are in a typically Neapolitan style, but the paper-types used in Handel’s manuscript indicate that he started composing it in Rome or Venice shortly before he left Italy, and did not complete the work until after June 1710, when he was appointed Kapellmeister at Hanover. Apollo e Dafne is among the most frequently recorded of Handel’s cantatas but Bonizzoni and La Risonanza lend their magic touch to the captivating dramatic dialogue, and supreme musicianship is allied to insightful characterisation. Apollo has liberated Greece from the monstrous serpent Python, and brags that his arrows have greater potency than Cupid’s.


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