An interview with David Bates

Tell us about your concept for this album…

I really wanted it to celebrate La Nuova Musica and our wonderful players, and I also wanted to do another project with Iestyn Davies. We’ve got some fantastic obbligato players in LNM at the moment, and it struck me that while it’s wonderful that the singers are centre-stage, everything going on in the pit is just as starry, virtuosic and expressive. So I wanted to put the instrumental soloists on stage next to the singers and really extoll that partnership.

And what about your additions to the singing line-up?

There are a lot of obbligato arias from the operas for Iestyn, but there were some corkers that we just had to include. We thought about transposing them, but we felt we’d do lose the quality of the tonality and the character of the instrument. Lucy Crowe has been singing with us since day one, and I don’t think there’s a better Handelian soprano out there. Christine Rice is a dream. She is so focused, clear and professional, and warm with it; that’s the lovely thing about her. You wrote the ornaments for the arias; can you tell us more about the need to do that?

In a production you explore the psychological journey of the character through the aria. On a recording, I’ve got to decide where the aria is going, otherwise it doesn’t have a dramatic narrative. I can do that through the ornamentation. You can either drive it by adding more notes, or higher notes, or longer notes; or you can pare it back completely and do it with the dynamics. It becomes a real collaboration with the performer.