Favorites: Jacquelyn Stucker

There’s a recording of Ariodante by Handel I particularly like with Anne Sofie von Otter in the title role, Lynne Dawson sings Ginevra, and Ewa Podleś sings Polinesso. I’m not a huge fan of everything in the recording but it’s a great cast with great singing, I could listen to that over and over and over. It includes both of the overtures Handel wrote for it, which I think is very special. 

Handel was a composer from the Baroque period and in those times, we didn’t associate musical keys with particular emotions which Romanticism taught us to do, you know, F minor is sad, right? But in the Baroque and Renaissance periods that preceded it, you could have a sad song of farewell in a major key and it’s so beautiful, and yet so sorrowful. For me, I like that dissonance between what you expect and what you get, it’s so provocative. A good example is the aria Verdi prati from Alcina, another Handel opera.  

Handel writes female characters exceptionally well – in a way that is ambiguous where it needs to be, and in other ways to suggest a woman not afraid of being in power, which I really like. There’s a great recording of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Handel’s La Lucrezia with Harry Bicket. It’s a wonderful cantata, and I think about the way Handel characterises Lucretia who has been raped. It’s so powerful, and it’s so right. He got it. Handel’s amazing, there’s something for everyone in it. He really takes different emotions and looks at them through a kaleidoscope.  

Handel: Ariodante – Les Musiciens du Louvre, cond. Marc Minkowski – Archiv Produktion, 1997