Handel Ballo per Orchestra – Kiefer

Handel spent most of his working life stitching things together — borrowing an aria from one opera to plug a hole in another, retooling a dead soprano’s showpiece for a live tenor, raiding his own overtures when deadlines got tight. He would have understood exactly what Dominik Kiefer and his Capriccio Barockorchester are up to on this disc. I suspect he’d have approved. There’s something almost impertinent about a program built entirely from the connective tissue of his operas and oratorios: the ritornellos, the entr’actes, the sinfonias that usually just usher an audience toward the aria they actually paid to hear. Here the scaffolding becomes the building.

It works, mostly, because Handel’s orchestral imagination never idles. Even his filler has personality.

The horns get the first half. They’re a rowdy bunch — not the polished, vibrato-scrubbed horns of a modern band but instruments with grain and burr to them, the kind that occasionally crack a note and sound better for it. In the excerpt from Samson they practically guffaw, tumbling through dissonances that Handel clearly wrote with a wink. Kiefer lets the ensemble lean into the roughness rather than sanding it down. The effect is exhilarating in the way live horn-playing from this period ought to be: you hear the physical effort, the held breath, the slight bloom of pitch settling into place a fraction of a second late.

Ariodante fares beautifully. The Sinfonia has organ and winds trading little birdlike phrases back and forth — sympathetically chirping, though the balance engineers at the Martinskirche in Basel deserve credit too, because that kind of interplay dies fast in a boomy acoustic. It doesn’t die here. And “Vo’ far guerra,” normally a vehicle for a coloratura mezzo throwing down a vocal gauntlet, becomes a harpsichord showpiece. Yves Bilger takes the aria’s swagger and translates it into keyboard bravura, fingers clattering through the divisions while a recorder skitters overhead like it’s trying to get a word in.

That’s the real pleasure of this record: hearing where Handel’s vocal lines land when you strip away the words. “Ombra mai fu” reduced to solo cello is a cliché of late-night radio programming. The disc’s subtler transplants are more interesting. “Occhi belli,” from Il pastor fido, passed first to harpsichord and then to the violin of Filip Rekiec, who ornaments the line with a kind of restrained, silvery inevitability, never oversweetening it. You forget, briefly, that there were ever words attached at all.

The second half switches allegiance to the trumpets, and inevitably loses a little of the woodwind intimacy that made the first half so absorbing — trumpets in Handel tend toward ceremony rather than conversation, all D-major glitter and public address. Still, there’s a lovely, underpopulated moment in “Softest Sounds” from Athalia, handed to flute and oboe. Keiko Kinoshita and Aleksandr Fester play it with a kind of hushed tenderness that almost makes you wish Handel had written more chamber-scaled numbers for his choruses to rest inside.

Small grievance: somebody at Tudor forgot to credit bassoonist Rainer Johannsen in the booklet. That’s a shame, because his contributions in the lower registers are what keep several of these tuttis from floating away into treble prettiness. Give the man his name back on the reprint.

Is this essential Handel? No. Nobody needs this disc the way they need a first-rate Messiah or a Giulio Cesare with a great Cleopatra. But it’s a genuinely illuminating listen, a reminder that Handel’s dramatic instincts extended into passages nobody was meant to notice — the seams and joints of his theatrical machinery. Kiefer’s band plays with real character, imperfect, breathing, occasionally raucous, and Almira’s rustic Ritornello, all folksy recorder and stamping rhythm, followed by melancholy so sudden it catches you off guard, tells you more about Handel’s dramatic economy in ninety seconds than a whole aria sometimes does.

Recommended, with modest expectations and real affection. This isn’t the Handel disc you reach for first. It might be the one you reach for twice.