Avery Amereau Sings Handel Arias with PBO

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past Friday Philharmonia Baroque Productions released its latest CD. The album features contralto Avery Amereau singing fifteen arias by George Frideric Handel, accompanied by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) led by Music Director Nicholas McGegan. Over the course of those fifteen tracks the album accounts for one cantata (the opening track) and seven Handel operas as follows (in “order of appearance”):

1. Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (HWV 72)
2. Agrippina (HWV 6)
3. Rinaldo (HWV 7)
4. Silla (HWV 10)
5. Amadigi di Gaula (HWV 11)
6. Radamisto (HWV 12)
7. Giulio Cesare (HWV 17)
8. Alcina (HWV 34)

The accompanying booklet provides a richly informative account of the context for all selections, written by Bruce Lamott, Scholar-in-Residence for the PBO and Chorale.

Readers may recall that Amereau was also the soloist on the PBO recording of Caroline Shaw’s oratorio “The Listeners,” which was released at the beginning of this month. This new album provides a much richer account of her talents. There will probably be those wondering if fifteen arias extracted from seven operas and one cantata might be a bit much. However, as those enamored of Handel’s operas know, the individual arias cover a wide variety of character dispositions, which frequently endow relatively thin (and sometimes dubious) plot lines with the substance of richly substantive personalities.

In that context the entire album has clearly been planned with a similar “tour” of character dispositions in mind. The result is that there is far more to Amereau’s talents than her technical command of each of the arias and the intimate chemistry through which she engages with accompaniment from PBO. There is also her appreciation of that diversity of personalities and her ability to endow each of them with those distinctive traits that make each character unique.

Nevertheless, the overall scope of the album may strike some as intimidating. After all, in the context of a full opera, character personalities are established (and may then change) over the course of the extended plot. It would be fair to say that many may prefer to sample this album, rather than take a sit-still-and-listen journey through all fifteen tracks. Indeed, current technology tends to favor that first approach to listening; and I do not think that either Handel or Amereau would be the worse for such a “piecemeal” approach.

Still, I would point out that, for those preferring the beginning-to-end journey, there is much to be gained from following the instrumental work as well as the vocal solos. There is rich diversity in Handel’s approaches to instrumentation, tempo, and even motivic character, as much as there is in the personalities of the characters being portrayed through he vocal work. One might almost call this album a study in “what makes Handel tick” with McGegan as the skilled watchmaker showing off the elegant interactions across gears and springs that goes into establishing just the right setting for Amereau’s splendidly diverse vocal talents.