HANDEL : ALCINA

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 26th of June 2011 at 3.03 - 6.35 pm

HANDEL: Alcina, an opera in three acts
Alcina........................... Anja Harteros
Morgana....................... Veronica Cangemi
Ruggiero....................... Vesselina Kasarova
Bradamante................... Kristina Hammarström
Orontë.......................... Benjamin Bruns
Melisso......................... Adam Plachetka
Les Musiciens du Louvre/Marc Minkowski
(recorded in the State Opera, Vienna by Austrian Radio)

INTRODUCTION (Wikipedia)
BACKGROUND
REVIEW
RECORDINGS
LIBRETTO (Italian)


Alcina (dating from 1735) has long been associated with Joan Sutherland, since she (not Maria Callas) brought it out of obscurity, and she reveled in the coloratura singing, the fantastic staging, and the lavish costumes (in a production of Franco Zeffirelli in 1960). Her recording of it (1962) with husband Richard Bonynge as conductor is highly regarded (though she is accused of 'mooning' and neglecting her consonants); I have the one disk (vinyl) of selections. Also highly rated is the one with Arleen Auger, conducted by the late Richard Hickox (1986), which I have as four black discs in a plain green box (remember the World Record Club?). And now we have William Christie's version (click on RECORDINGS above) starring those three engaging sopranos who introduce the Metropera showings at the cinema: Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Natalie Dessay.
   The background to this opera (as for so many others) is Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso. The immediate source was L'isola di Alcina (1728) by Riccardo Broschi; he was the brother of Carlo Broschi the celebrated castrato, stage name Farinelli (and if you know the movie of that name it alleges that when Carlo brought home a female fan, he gave the lady the preliminaries and Riccardo applied the finishing touches; that was the agreement, the women were told; but I know that even infant boys can have a rush of blood to their appendage, so why not the castrati?).

   Where were we? Well, Alcina liked to fall in love with men, but when she tired of them she set them aside; but she did not, like Circe in an identical situation, turn them into pigs and make her habitat a swinery; no, she transformed them into vegetable and mineral adornments to her landscape, but in the end, like all the witch's lollipops and gingerbread men in Hansel and Gretel, they returned to their original human form, when the spell was broken, and in Alcina's case, when her magic urn was smashed.