Iestyn Davies

Scofield: You’ve been making walks between Covent Garden and Mayfair, visiting places where Handel himself wandered around the city, and then you created a playlist of Handel music for a walk, similar to the one that Handel probably did himself. What are the details about that?

Davies: I’m doing a concert with The English Concert, we’re doing a program called Handel’s London Altos, which under the umbrella of a residency that I’ve got at King’s place. They’ve got an overall theme which is “London and immigrants”. Handel, of course is a German immigrant to London, and I want to do a program which I’ve planned for quite a long time, or certainly something around it. This idea is that the alto voice, the one I have, and the one that the contralto or mezzo-soprano has, if they were a woman, and that the castrati would have, an alto castrato, such as Senesino, were the voices which Handel wrote these parts. But they’re not all the same. They’re all different. However, we tend to say that’s the outline nowadays, and we share it out equally. So I wanted to reflect on the influence of not only Handel on the voice type, but also the voice type on Handel, and London’s influence on Handel’s composition. That’s to say that in London, Handel had this freedom to write music, and perform music in all the different aspects of society. In the church, at court, in the court chapels, on the theater stage, in the opera house, and also in the oratorio, which is also the theater but in a slightly different way.

Basically, I put together a program of some of my favorite bits of music to sing, including “Pompe vane di morte’…’ Dove Sei?” amongst other things, which were all written and performed in London, and kind of chart that story. There are castrato arias, so Senesino who sang Bertarido in Rodelinda, who sang “Pompe vane di morte’…’ Dove Sei?”, there’s one of the most beautiful arias yet sung by one of the lesser characters in Rinaldo, “Sorge nel petto”, but that was sung by a woman, actually originally it was sung by soprano, and it was transposed and a woman sang it. There’s a beautiful chamber cantata, which tells the story of the private concert, and then we finish up towards the end more towards the oratorio.

Sadly because of the pandemic, we have to shorten the concert. There were actually some more arias in there which would have included, pieces written specifically and rarely for the countertenors. Countertenors didn’t really exist as a thing outside choirs, so the chapel royal would have had countertenors, and Handel did write specific things for those countertenors. We think of that very famous aria for trumpet and voice, Eternal Source of Light Divine, which I’ve recorded a couple of times, most notably with Alison Balsom on a disc of music she did of Baroque music. That was written for a singer called Richard Elford, who sang at the chapel royal, so Handel would have known countertenor, as it wasn’t just about the castrati.

I call it a setlist, because I think we’re quite used nowadays to whether it be on Spotify, or not to advertise, but any of these streaming platforms to put together music, and listen to it at your cooking or whatever, and not have the interruption of applause, and you can kind of curate your own little concerts at home. I put this together based on music that the orchestra plays, but it’s not overtures. Handel’s operas are full of little ballets and dances or small sinfonias that lead into a scene, and by putting them together, I was able to create something that key signature terms would neatly go into one another. If you take an aria from the middle of an opera, you’ve got nothing to set it up. So what I try to do is put a short orchestral excerpt. For example, there’s a small sinfonia about a minute long from Handel’s comic opera Partenope, it finishes and the aria from a completely different opera will start, and the two will sound like they’re meant to be together, which kind of works with Baroque music anyway, because