Handel in Italy, flattering his patrons with beguiling cantatas

When opera was proscribed by the Papal decree as frivilous and depraved (not that the Vatican objected to castratos!), the Roman aristocracy consoled itself with dramatic cantatas, in effect miniature unstaged operas. 'Il caro Sassone', as the young Handel was affectionately dubbed, enchanted his Roman patrons with dozens of such cantatas. As an inveterate musical recycler, he then quarried the cantatas and oratorios he composed in Italy for his London works. The exquisite (and exquistely sung) sarabande 'Lascia la spina' from Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, for instance, was plundered for Rinaldo, while a lilting aria from the cantata Aminta e Fillide that hovers hauntingly between major and minor became the Sirens' Song in the same opera.

With her vernal light lyric soprano, grace of line and vivid response to mood, Lucy Crowe proves well-nigh ideal in this conspectus of music from Handel's Italian years. Other singers, including Emanuela Galli (Glossa, 10/07), have brought more passion, and more verbal savour (Crowe's Italian consonants sometime lack 'bite'), to the tragic cantata Armida abbandonata. But she is intensely moving in Armida's final aria, singing with a haunted, bleached tone before a sudden infusion of bitterness at the accusatory 'quel traditor'. Here and elsewhere she subtly varies her vibrato for expressive effect.

In the poignant 'Ad te clamumus' from the Salve regina, Crowe negotiates the vertiginous leaps with effortless poise, while in an aria from La Resurrezione she puts the powers of darkness to flight in volleys of gleeful, glittering coloratura. Here and in Clori's indignant protestation of her innocence from Clori, Tirsi e Fileno, her da capo ornamantation soars extravagently into the stratosphere, far above the range of Handel's singers. Yet she brings it off with such panache that only a hair-shirt purist could complain. Crowe's delectable singing is complemented by fresh, rhythmically buoyant and, where needed, virtuoso playing from the English Concert, who on their own give sparkling performances of three instrumental numbers from that astonishingly fertile Italian sojourn.