By Ralph P. Locke

In Handel’s day, excerpts from his operas were often played at home, without singers. They sound great on this new recording by the group humorously (and quite inaccurately) called False Consonance.

George Frideric Handel: Il Sassone: A Domestic Opera. (Opera excerpts arranged for instruments)

Annie Gard (violin), Theo Small (recorder, flute), Thomas Fields (gamba, cello), Johannes Festerling (guitar, theorbo).

Da Vinci Classics 778—73 minutes.

Click to purchase or to listen to any tracks.

Here is a delightful way to spend more than an hour reveling in Handelian opera without worrying about the plot, trying to catch the words (or straining to read them), or endeavoring not to notice that the stage director has shifted the action from ancient Rome to, say, a crumbling nuclear-power plant.

The performers, who call themselves False Consonance, come from Germany, Australia, and the US. The recording was made in Bremen, Germany. The members of False Consonance play with exquisite precision and deep feeling — and their consonance is never false! They take natural tempos, neither frantic nor molasses-slow, and they never make annoyingly harsh noises to add supposed excitement. The overall tone is of friends, who happen to be superb musicians, playing music for their own delight and that of a small group of listeners. The recorded sound is somewhat close-up (I heard one intake of breath, and a bit of key noise), but this only adds to the feeling of immediacy.

And there’s an added plus: instead of a harpsichord playing the continuo part (filling in the harmonies “under” the melody instruments), it’s a lovely guitar. Now don’t get me wrong, I can often love the sound of a good harpsichord. But too often we still get (as we almost always did in the 1950s-60s) an annoying jangle. Whereas who doesn’t love the sound of a guitar? The guitar, like the harp, can perfectly well play arpeggiated chords and the like, just as well as a harpsichord or other keyboard instrument. Yet a guitar is rarely chosen for the task, perhaps because its sound is too gentle to hold up against a full orchestra. Well, no problem here, because it only has to compete with three other players.

The music is some of the best that Handel offers, which is to say marvelous: mostly arias from his operas, alternating at times with orchestral movements from his operas (and from one oratorio: Saul). The players take a few liberties, such as truncating one da capo repeat, or adding some fun ornamentation, but this all adds to the sense of spontaneity: one senses the players’ joy in making music together and sharing their love of these pieces.

Try this video trailer for a sense of the wonders they put on display:

The players have grouped the numbers into three “acts” (the third of which begins with an entire 12-minute trio sonata, played — as is the entire program — with spirit and elegance). I didn’t try to follow the imagined “plot” of this, in their phrase, “domestic opera,” which they have named Il Sassone, after Handel’s Italian nickname (“the man from Saxony”). I was more than content to enjoy spending 73 minutes with these four young musicians, as they reenacted the 18th-century tradition of playing excerpts from Italian operas on instruments alone.

The tradition, I should add, continued: many 19th-century operas were published in versions for piano without vocal lines, or, at most, with the text printed above the right-hand part! And of course, composers have produced fantasies or variations sets on beloved operatic numbers — Beethoven did this twice with numbers from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. And orchestras regularly perform Wagner excerpts without singers, though with results very different from the modest gentleness heard here.

Anybody who likes Baroque music — and the sound of a guitar — will be enchanted.

Indeed, I recommend the disc as a gift for people who don’t yet know that they like Baroque music. As the old ad (and some grandmothers) put it: “Try it, you’ll like it!”

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here by kind permission.