Handel : La Maga Abbandonata : Simone Kermes & Maite Beaumont - Alan Curtis / Il Complesso Barocco - SACD - 2003

Handel : La Maga Abbandonata
Simone Kermes, Maite Beaumont, Alan Curtis, Il Complesso Barocco

"But even Simone Kermes’s fine contributions to Peter Neumann’s recording of Belshazzar and to Curtis’s recent Deidamia hardly prepared me for her breathtaking assumption here of the roles of Armida, Alcina, and Melissa. The sheer firmness and agility of her line, her vertiginous yet always graceful and seemingly relaxed embellishments, and her stunning evocation alike of the most out-of-the-way and of the most familiar emotional states, all qualify her to be ranked as one of the greatest Handel singers of our time. Nor is the Spanish contralto Maite Beaumont, whom from her first name I take to be Catalan, any less impressive. Here is yet another of the splendid artists, including the contralto Sara Mingardo and such mezzo-sopranos as Anne-Sofie von Otter, Bernarda Fink, Anna Bonitatibus, Susan Graham, and Alice Coote, that are nowadays to be heard luxuriating in Handel’s lower-pitched female voice parts. The impact of Kermes’s and Beaumont’s singing is further enhanced by the Complesso Barocco’s impeccable playing and by an ideally spacious and vivid recording"

Fanfare

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
La Maga Abbadonata
From : Rinaldo
Alcina
Amadigi
Simone Kermes : Soprano
Maite Beaumont : Contralto
Donna Leon : Narration
Il Complesso Barocco
Alan Curtis
Recording : 21-22 September 2002, Markgrafliches Operhaus, Bayreuth (Germany)

More info about Simone Kermes : Here

More info about Alan Curtis & Il Complesso Barocco : Here