Handel: The Alchymist and Apollo e Dafne – Wentz

A young Handel, barely into his twenties, arrived in Italy with everything to prove and proceeded to prove it. Apollo e Dafne comes from the tail end of that Italian sojourn, though he didn’t finish the thing until he’d landed the Hanover job — scribbled across borders and courts and changes of employer. It eventually found its way to London and to Queen Anne’s birthday festivities in 1711: a piece about a god’s humiliation and a nymph’s arboreal escape, offered up as royal flattery. The court chronicler’s notice survives, calling it “outstanding Musick.” For once the flatterer undersold the goods.

This is not a cantata in any sense Alessandro Scarlatti would recognize. Scarlatti’s model — recitative, aria, recitative, aria, continuo doing the heavy lifting — is chamber music, made for a private room and a few candles. Handel blows that model open. Two singers, full instrumental complement: transverse flute, paired oboes, bassoon, strings. Nineteen sections. Nearly forty minutes. Call it a cantata if you like, but it breathes like an opera scene, and this album — a reissue of a 2007 SACD release, now on plain CD — treats it that way.

Jed Wentz and Musica ad Rhenum don’t let the seams show. Where Handel writes a recitative flowing straight into the following aria without pause, they press forward: no breath, no applause-gap, just narrative momentum. Too many recordings of this piece treat it as a museum piece, each number roped off like a display case. Here the chase feels like a chase.

Tom Sol’s Apollo swaggers in with real insolence, boasting that not even Cupid’s arrows sting like his. The coloratura runs are not merely accurate; they’re flung out with a kind of vocal chin-jutting that suits a sun-god’s ego. Then comes the fall, literal and emotional, and Sol’s control in the pianissimo passages of the closing aria, “Cara pianta,” is the finest thing on the disc. The tears-watering-the-laurel image could tip into kitsch in lesser hands. Sol keeps it painfully sincere, voice thinned to a thread, vibrato nearly suspended.

Nicola Wemyss gives Dafne backbone rather than mere prettiness. This Dafne isn’t fleeing decoratively, she’s furious, and her divisions carry an edge of genuine alarm. Some sopranos play the role as coy; Wemyss plays it as survival. The right instinct, given what Ovid — and Handel, following him — is actually describing.

Michael Borgstede’s continuo work deserves a mention most reviews skip past: alert, harmonically curious, occasionally cheeky with ornamentation in ways that keep the secco recitative from going slack. The band’s timbre throughout has that slightly reedy, unglossy Baroque-specialist sound, no vibrato cushioning, textures left a little raw, which some listeners still resist. I don’t. Handel’s orchestration wants air around it, and Musica ad Rhenum give it plenty.

The Alchymist, the incidental music that fills out the disc, is a lesser thing entirely — theater music, functional, charming in patches — but it’s dispatched with the same crispness and doesn’t overstay its eighteen minutes.

Does this displace existing recommendations — Emma Kirkby’s classic account, or more recent versions with starrier casts? Not entirely; there’s room on the shelf for several Apollos and Dafnes. But for dramatic urgency, for the sense that these two singers are listening and reacting to one another rather than trading party pieces, this reissue earns its keep. Handel at twenty-five, already knowing exactly what he was doing.