f Handel's more than one hundred cantatas for voice, eighteen for alto have recently been published in an edition for Oxford by Ellen Harris, the distinguished Handel scholar and professor at MIT. The designation alto implies no gender association. In Handel's day they would have been sung by either a woman or a castrato, nowadays, as in this performance, by a countertenor. The composition of cantatas spanned virtually the whole of Handel's career, beginning during his years in Italy where they were sung at private entertainments by well-known performers of the day. The fact that Handel continued to write cantatas to Italian texts even after he came to England, even after he had given up composition of Italian operas, suggest that he used these small forms as a means of experimentation and the perfecting of technique, as well as for gifts to singer friends. Qualor crudele is difficult to date, but since no Italian manuscript score has been found some have thought it likely to have been composed during Handel's English years. Professor Harris suggests that evidence for this view is lacking, and that it might well have been composed in Italy. From whatever compositional period it comes, the work is charming and sophisticated in equal parts and is laid out in a conventional pattern of recitative, aria, recitative, aria. Only in recent years have performers begun to explore this rich resource of often highly charged and compacted emotional miniatures, and by so doing have added greatly to our knowledge and appreciation for yet another aspect of the art of this great Baroque master.

Jeffrey Gall, countertenor, performs this piece at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston on November 5, 2005.

Read notes on other pieces performed in the same concert:

• Handel's The Choice of Hercules
• Handel's Coronation Anthems

© 2005 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.