One of an important works of Handel’s Italian interval, La Resurrezione was first carried out privately, on Easter Day in 1708, in the home of one of many composer’s Roman patrons. It’s a exceptional piece in some methods. The topic in itself is uncommon: depictions of the resurrection are comparatively uncommon in music, as certainly they're in artwork, nearly as if approaching the central thriller of Christianity have been in some methods on the limits of human creativeness.
Handel’s remedy is indirect, albeit hanging. A supernatural colloquy between Lucifer and an Angel describes the harrowing of hell, whereas on Earth, saints John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene and Mary Cleophas anxiously await the daybreak that may reveal Christ’s tomb to be empty. As so typically in Handel, nevertheless, there's an underlying sense of God’s glory mirrored within the bodily marvel of creation, and the textual equation of Christ with the solar paves the best way for an astonishingly lovely depiction of pure renewal after the harshness of winter.
The ensuing sensuous immediacy very a lot predominated in Easter Monday’s efficiency by the London Handel Orchestra beneath Laurence Cummings, a part of each the London Handel pageant and the Easter pageant at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Cummings proved an exacting decide of the typically tough steadiness between drama and reflection, teasing out instrumental element as he went – the woodwind that alternately grieve and console, the heat within the strings, the gleam within the brass that ultimately heralds the triumph of sunshine over darkness.
There was some fantastic singing, too. Nardus Williams sounded ravishing as Mary Magdalene, her rapt introspection contrasted with the bravura brilliance of Helen Charlston’s Mary Cleophas. Rachel Redmond’s Angel showered Callum Thorpe’s sullen, gritty-voiced Lucifer with volleys of gleefully exact coloratura. And as John the Evangelist, Ed Lyon sang with burnished tone and deep sincerity, bringing an ecstatic high quality to Ecco Il Sol Ch’Esce Dal Mare that arguably made it the emotional excessive level of a fantastic and rewarding night.
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