There is a moment in the second act of Giulio Cesare — Handel wrote it in 1724, at the absolute height of his London powers — when the orchestra simply takes over, and the drama breathes differently. Most conductors treat these sinfonias as necessary pauses, a chance to reset the scenery. Alan Curtis treats them as arguments. With Il Complesso Barocco playing at chamber scale, every line audible, every ornament a small event, the music sounds freshly composed rather than excavated. That’s a rarer achievement than it sounds.
Giulio Cesare has been recorded obsessively, arguably more than any other Handel opera. The competition is formidable and various. René Jacobs brought theatrical electricity and some willful eccentricity to his version. William Christie gave us something more sensuous and French in its grain. Nicholas McGegan’s release, leaner still, has its admirers. Curtis arrives later to this particular party, and the question is what he adds.
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
The instrumental playing alone would justify the set. The horn obbligato in Caesar’s “Va tacito e nascosto” — that magnificent image of the hunter waiting in silence — emerges with a woody, slightly edgy tone that feels genuinely Baroque rather than merely period-inflected. And the violin writing in Act III, sometimes smothered in more lavish productions, has real transparency here. Small forces, sharply articulated, closely recorded: you can hear individual bow changes, the slight pressure of vibrato entering and leaving a phrase. It matters.
But this is, after all, an opera. And the singing is remarkable.
Marie-Nicole Lemieux takes the title role, and her voice — a contralto of genuine weight and chest resonance — gives Caesar a physical authority that countertenors, however technically accomplished, rarely quite project. There’s something thrillingly ungainly about it, in the best sense. Her coloratura in the heroic arias crackles with intent rather than mere display; she sounds like she means every note as a dramatic statement. Handel gave Caesar more arias than almost any other character in his operas, and by the end of three hours-plus you understand exactly why this Roman general commands loyalty and fear in equal measure.
Karina Gauvin’s Cleopatra is the necessary counterweight. Lemieux’s Caesar is granite; Gauvin’s Cleopatra is mercury. Her voice has that particular soprano quality — warm in the middle, brilliant at the top — that suits Handel’s endlessly inventive writing for this character. Cleopatra gets the best tunes in the opera, and Handel knew it, and Gauvin knows it too. She deploys ornamentation with a kind of aristocratic casualness that is, in fact, the product of enormous discipline.
Filippo Mineccia’s Tolomeo deserves special mention. Ptolemy is a villain, but Handel being Handel, even the villain gets music of real complexity — and Mineccia navigates the role’s demands with a countertenor voice that has surprising darkness in it, a slightly threatening undertow that suits the character’s political ruthlessness. Romina Basso as Cornelia brings genuine pathos, and Emöke Baráth’s Sesto is alert and urgent throughout.
None of this should surprise anyone who has followed Curtis’s Handel series. He has a gift for collaborative musicmaking, for creating conditions in which singers and players seem to be discovering the music together in real time rather than executing a predetermined interpretation. The risk is that it can occasionally feel underdriven — there are moments in the long third act where the momentum slackens slightly, where a more imperious hand on the tiller might have served better. But that’s a small complaint against a very large achievement.
The opera itself remains, as always, slightly mysterious in its appeal. Handel wrote grander works, more consistently inspired ones — Tamerlano, the following year, strikes me as the deeper masterpiece — but Giulio Cesare has a generosity of spirit, a sheer abundance of memorable melody, that explains its enduring hold. Three hours and forty minutes, and you want more. Curtis and his forces make the strongest possible case for it.
