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La Resurrezione review – wonderful singing takes Handel into the ecstatic
St Martin-in-the-Fields, LondonThe London Handel Orchestra under Laurence Cummings gave a detailed and sensuous account of Handel’s oratorio, with Nardus Williams ravishing as Mary Magdalene
One of the most important works of Handel’s Italian period, La Resurrezione was first performed privately, on Easter Day in 1708, in the house of one of the composer’s Roman patrons. It’s a remarkable piece in some ways. The subject in itself is unusual: depictions of the resurrection are comparatively rare in music, as indeed they are in art, almost as if approaching the central mystery of Christianity were in some ways at the limits of human imagination.
Handel’s treatment is oblique, albeit striking. A supernatural colloquy between Lucifer and an Angel describes the harrowing of hell, while on Earth, saints John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene and Mary Cleophas anxiously await the dawn that will reveal Christ’s tomb to be empty. As so often in Handel, however, there is an underlying sense of God’s glory reflected in the physical wonder of creation, and the textual equation of Christ with the sun paves the way for an astonishingly beautiful depiction of natural renewal after the harshness of winter.
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