Handel
's
Solomon, HWV 67
, of 1749, has never been one of his most popular biblical oratorios; it was a comparative flop in its own time, and even today, it is less often heard than the likes of
Messiah
and
Judas Maccabaeus
, but it is not clear why this should be so.
himself esteemed the work highly and revived it just before his death. Possibly the English public was ready for something new after
's unbroken run of hits, but more likely is that it is a different kind of work from
, less dramatic and more poetic. The singer in the lead role of Solomon has a lot to do. Here, he is sung by a countertenor,
Christopher Lowrey
, although
would have used a woman by this time.
Lowrey
is not
Andreas Scholl
, who has sung the part, but his voice is suited to the reflective quality of many of the arias and grows on the listener as the oratorio proceeds. The other singers are uniformly strong, and the
Choeur de Chambre de Namur
Millenium Orchestra
(the spelling is original) keep up with conductor
Leonardo Garcia Alarcon
through his blistering speeds in the choruses. In the studio, those speeds might have seemed unreasonable, but this was a live recording, and the audience was clearly in tune with what
Garcia Alarcon
was doing. This is overall a highly energetic performance, and it works even though the "Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" (in the "Symfony" in Act III) is perhaps less stately than one would wish. Less successful, perhaps, is the engineering per se; the chorus is too far in the background, and some of the energy is robbed from its big moments. However, this is nevertheless a powerful recording of this
masterwork, which landed on classical best-seller charts in early 2023. ~ James Manheim