Curnyn’s lovers snatch the crown
Christian Curnyn (director)
Early Opera Company Chandos CHSA 0404(2)
Although Handel tinkered with the score, there’s something about the directness and intimacy of the pared-back original that blossoms so beguilingly when appropriate forces are deployed. Adrian Boult recorded it with the London Symphony Orchestra, Joan Sutherland and Peter Pears in the mid 1960s, and as the taste for something lighter grew, so chamber orchestras such as Neville Marriner’s Academy of St Martin in the Fields stepped up to the plate. But that same year, (1978), John Eliot Gardiner and the period instruments of his newly formed English Baroque Soloists offered a historically informed alternative, and since then Acis has never looked back – revelling in the fruity sound of baroque oboes, the piercing piquancy of the sopranino recorder and a style of singing that that engages directly with one of the finest librettos Handel ever set.
Latest into the fray is Christian Curnyn’s Early Opera Company, and against strong competition this 2017 account snatches the crown. Not entirely surprisingly so – their Handelian credentials have long been rehearsed on stage and in the recording studio, and Curnyn ‘speaks Handel’ with a penetrating fluency and naturalness.
The scale is essentially that of the Cannons first performance, but with six rather than four violins, the addition of a theorbo to enrich the continuo, and – why wouldn’t you! – the addition of the later choral afterthought to the duet ‘Happy we!’, here crackling with joy unconfined.
Curnyn’s pacing is lively – in the Sinfonia, whose chortling oboes hang on for dear life, some might say ‘excitable’ – and there isn’t a weak link in the casting. Lucy Crowe was born to sing Galatea: melismas float; kittenish sensuality propels ‘Happy we!’; numb simplicity seals the vulnerability of ‘Must I my Acis still bemoan’; and, swaddled amid murmuring recorders, her final aria ravishes. Allan
Christian Curnyn’s is a performance that leaves you savouring every note
Clayton’s impetuous, hot-headed Acis similarly compels, and ‘Love sounds the alarm’ marches to battle with a momentum that encourages a certain swaggering braggadocio. But tender lyricism is never wanting, and how affectingly he dies, Curnyn nurturing an almost Purcellian pathos at the end of the ensuing chorus. Neal Davies brings stentorian heft and presence to Polyphemus’s rages and gaucheries (though Matthew Brook in John Butt’s recording (see above) fleshes him out with even more lurid relish). Curnyn’s, in short, is a performance that leaves you savouring every note… and then some!