Handel's Italians (Italian Castrati in the London Oratorios)

Without Italians, No Handelian Oratorio

That sounds like provocation, but this album sets out to prove it in twenty-one tracks.

We all know Handel spent his later London years writing English oratorios: Messiah, Samson, Theodora. But few ask who sang them into fame. The answer: a group of Italians — more precisely, a group of castrati.

In the 1720s Handel brought Senesino, then Europe’s most famous castrato, to London; they worked together until 1733. Early English oratorios like Esther and Deborah were, in a sense, written to give Senesino English songs to sing — fundraising for the opera house on the side, inventing a new genre along the way.

Castrati: Let’s Get the Awkward Part Over With

The castrato is music history’s darkest and most glittering page: boys operated on before their voices broke, keeping a child’s range with a grown man’s lungs — a sound neither male nor female, beautiful enough to raise goosebumps, at the cost of an entire life.

There can never be castrati today, so these roles fall to countertenors. Carlo Vistoli, born 1987 in Lugo, Italy, took up the countertenor only in 2007 and graduated in 2015 from William Christie’s Le Jardin des Voix — the Shaolin temple of the world’s countertenors.

His voice doesn’t do “ethereal.” It’s full-bodied, sturdy, with an Italian dramatic urgency. Hearing him, you believe it: three centuries ago, when those castrati stood on stage, no wonder the house went mad.

The Italian Versions, Recorded for the First Time

What excites scholars most here isn’t the famous numbers but a batch of Italian versions “never recorded before.”

Here’s what happened: some oratorio roles were written for Italian castrati, and Handel would translate the English words into Italian so they’d sing comfortably. David’s role in Saul, for Andreoni (in London 1738–41), went in Italian as “Di Jonathan”; Carestini got Athalia in Italian; the 1750–51 revisions of Messiah and Belshazzar were tailored for Guadagni.

Those manuscripts sat in libraries for centuries, ignored. Haïm and her Astrée players dug out the old scores and cut them to disc, one by one. Twenty-one tracks, one CD, roughly half of them world premieres on record.

The Theodora Duet: Three Most Beautiful Minutes

If I could keep one track, it would be the Theodora duet “To thee, thou glorious son of worth,” Vistoli with soprano Giulia Semenzato.

Theodora was Handel’s own favorite oratorio — and a flop at its premiere, when audiences preferred the entertainment next door. Three centuries on, the duet sounds like a hit that arrived late: two voices entwining tighter and tighter until you can’t tell them apart, like two people choosing martyrdom together, and the martyrdom is love.

The Woman Conducting from the Organ

Emmanuelle Haïm, born Paris 1962, trained as a harpsichordist, founded the Astrée ensemble in Lille in 2000, and has been resident at the Lille Opera since 2004. On this disc she conducts while playing the organ — exactly how it worked in the Baroque era, when direction came from the keyboard.

Her Handel has a “live” quality: unhurried tempi, modest ornamentation, every phrase shaped like speech. You finish feeling that Handel wasn’t a museum composer but a theater boss facing box offices, singers, and sponsors every day — no different from a Broadway producer today.

December’s Messiah

The Astrée band tours Messiah this December: Utrecht, Paris, Lyon, Barcelona, Madrid, all the way to Disney Hall in Los Angeles; then the Salzburg Easter Festival in March 2027. No Taiwan date yet, but the wishing well stays open.

Vistoli also gives New York recitals on September 10 and 12 (the pianist is a Zappa — not that Zappa, don’t get ideas).

Three centuries ago, castrati sang fate into legend; today’s countertenors sing legend back into human reach. This album is that bridge.