Before turning to the choral compositions such as Messiah, for which he is best known today, a musicologist produced a string of Italian-language operas that vied for audiences in the ...

Opera Santa Barbara opens the new year with its third company premiere of the season: a 90-minute adaptation of Handel’s comedy “Semele,” set in Hollywood’s silent movie era. Performances take place ...

Song Hee Lee as Cleopatra amid Ruckus at Hudson Hall. Photo: Paul Kheir Since it began its Carnegie series of Handel operas and oratorios, The English Concert has presented its offerings complete or ...

Handel was born with an umlaut on his name: Händel. He rubbed it out after he left his native Germany for a sojourn of several years in Italy before emigrating to non-diacritical England in 1711 as ...

The Detroit Opera puts a contemporary spin on Handel’s classic 1738 opera “Xerxes.” The Detroit Opera has put a contemporary spin on Handel’s classic 1738 “Xerxes” masterpiece about love and the ...

Cambridge Handel Opera Company capture the self-referential charm of this mid-career novelty operetta Any opera with two pairs of young lovers inevitably gets compared to Così fan tutte. But in the ...

In 1731 Handel wrote part of Act I for an opera entitled Titus L’Empereur. For reasons that are still unknown, he then abandoned it, although he reworked its Overture and two arias for his next opera ...

Most people who experience George Frideric Handel’s operas do so as spectators, taking in the music and drama onstage from a comfy, velvet-wrapped seat in the audience. Conductor Jane Glover, however, ...

Handel is now best known for his mighty oratorios. ‘Tis the season for Messiah. But he was late to that game, deep as he was into Italian opera, the blockbuster genre of the 18 th century and the one ...