La Resurrezione
One of the joys of Eastertide is to listen to Handel’s oratorio La Resurrezione. It is a youthful work: the composer was 23 when it was first performed in Rome on Easter Sunday 1708, with an elite orchestra led by Corelli. As Graham Abbott has written, ‘It is in fact an unstaged opera on a religious subject, with a text by Carlo Sigismondo Capece, secretary to the Queen of Poland, who was exiled in Rome.’ Capece strikingly set the Christian drama with reference to both apocryphal and pagan traditions, showing forth Christ’s Easter victory as the culmination of even implicit hopes. This is a lovely recording. My favourite, though, is this, conducted by Minkowski, with Jennifer Smith singing gloriously in the role of Maria Maddalena.
