Early Opera Company / Christian Curnyn HANDEL Semele

Performed “in the manner of an oratorio” (this was Lent 1744), Handel’s tragi-comedy of lust and ambition was far too depraved for contemporaries like Charles Jennens, who contemptuously dismissed it as “a baudy opera”. (A friend countered by dubbing it a “Bawdatorio”.) Today, of course, Semele is, with Giulio Cesare – another uninhibited celebration of the power of sex – the Handel work most likely to fill an opera house. Of a handful of previous recordings, none was entirely satisfying, though Gardiner’s 1981 Erato set might have been if had not cut around 40 minutes of music. Which makes this new version – complete save for an aria for Cupid that Handel later pilfered for Hercules – all the more welcome.

Christian Curnyn understands the unique tinta of this gorgeous score, and directs his spruce period band with a nice blend of nonchalant elegance and dramatic energy. Tempi are shrewdly judged, rhythms light and supple, and recitatives tumble inevitably into arias. The tragic d»nouement in Act 3 has due weight and intensity, whether in the tenderly inflected accompanied recitatives for Jupiter and Semele, or the awed chorus of Thebans after the heroine’s incineration. As at the English National Opera, Rosemary Joshua, radiant of tone, dazzling in coloratura, makes Semele far more than an over-sexed airhead. She is trills ethereally in “The morning lark”, distils a drowsy, erotic languor in “O†sleep, why dost thou leave me?”, and ornaments her “mirror” aria, “Myself I shall adore”, with dizzy glee. She is imploring and fiery by turns in her exchanges with Jupiter, and brings real pathos to the haunting siciliano “Thus let my thanks be paid” and her sublime death scene. As Jupiter, Richard Croft fields a honeyed, sensuous tone (heard to advantage in a seductive “Where’re you walk”) and formidable agility, though he could learn a thing or two about diction from Gardiner’s Anthony Rolfe-Johnson.

Like Handel himself, Curnyn assigns the virago Juno and Semele’s gentle sister Ino to the same singer. Hilary Summers, a true, deep contralto, characterises both roles well, though in sheer bitchiness her Juno yields to Della Jones (Gardiner) and Marilyn Horne, on the variably cast DG recording conducted by John Nelson (where Kathleen Battle’s ultra-knowing, heavy-lidded Semele may be more to your taste than mine). Brindley Sherratt, with his oaky bass, offers vivid, witty cameos as Cadmus and Somnus, while Stephen Wallace sings Athamas’s arias with smooth tone and a nimble florid technique, though a suspicion remains that the role lies a bit low for him. With excellent recorded sound and balance, and an informative essay from David Vickers, this becomes a clear first choice for an ever-enticing work. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)

Early Opera Company / Christian Curnyn HANDEL Serse

‘One of the worst that Handel ever set to music’, ran a contemporary verdict on the libretto of Serse, whose ‘mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery’ fazed London audiences in 1738. History, of course, has had its revenge. Today the very qualities that puzzled its original hearers – the lightly ironic, occasionally farcical tone, the fluid structure (many short ariosos, relatively few full-dress da capo arias) – have made Serse one of Handel’s most attractive operas for stage directors and audiences alike. There are episodes of high seriousness, above all in the magnificent sequence of Act 2 arias beginning with Serse’s aria di bravura ‘Se bramate’. But much of the invention has an airy melodiousness, whether in the dulcet minuet songs for the coquettish Atalanta, or Serse’s invocation to a plane tree, ‘Ombra mai fu’, immortalised and sentimentalised as ‘Handel’s Largo’.

Until now the CD choice has been between the performances directed by Nicholas McGegan and William Christie. While there is much to enjoy in both, the Christie especially, they suffer from uneven casting. Not so this new recording, finely sung and conducted with style and spirit by Christian Curnyn. From the opening ‘Ombra mai fu’, taken flowingly (Anne Sofie von Otter and Christie are indulgently languorous here), Anglo-French mezzo Anna Stéphany sings superbly as the capricious Serse. Von Otter makes the king more of an absurd, if dangerous, psychopath. With her glowing, impassioned mezzo, Stéphany presents a more sympathetic character in arias such as the touching ‘Il core spera’, while giving full vent to Serse’s petulant wilfulness elsewhere. She hurls herself into the frenzied coloratura of ‘Se bramate’ and rages thrillingly in the torrential invocation to the furies just before the denouement.

As the heroine Romilda, Rosemary Joshua far eclipses her counterparts on the rival recordings, singing with sweet, sensuous tone and characterising deftly. She can be blithe, as in her Act 2 aria ‘Se l’idol mio’, but brings a fiery intensity to her agonised central aria, ‘È gelosia’. As her long-suffering lover Arsamene, David Daniels is at least a match for Lawrence Zazzo (with Christie), colouring his tone sensitively in the grief-laden ‘Non so se sia la speme’ and relishing the indignant coloratura brilliance of his one bravura aria, ‘Sì, la voglio’.

With her highly distinctive androgynous contralto, Hilary Summers suggests the pathos as well as the outrage of Serse’s wronged fiancée Amastre (Christie’s Silvia Tro Santafe turns her into a frenzied virago on speed); and Joélle Harvey catches the flighty grace, as well as the hints of deeper feelings, in Handel’s delicious arias for Atalanta. Brindley Sherratt, oakily sonorous of tone as the worthy-but-dim general Ariodate, and the incisive Andreas Wolf as an unhammy comic servant Elviro, complete a near-ideal cast. Once or twice – say, in Romilda’s aria ‘Chi cede al furore’ at the end of Act 1 – I thought Curnyn’s tempi a shade deliberate. But on the whole he paces the opera acutely, not least in the long stretches of recitative. For anyone wanting to acquire this jewel among Handel’s later operas, this beautifully recorded new version is the one to go for. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)