The singular Agrippina named in the title of this release is actually three women by that name, all related. The most famous is Julia Agrippina, the daughter of the Roman general Germanicus and the mother of Nero, but the lives of her mother and aunt also furnished rich material for Baroque operatic librettists. It's commonplace to observe that Baroque audiences knew the history of ancient Rome in a way that's hard to imagine today, but it has not been so common to translate this wisdom into an album programming concept, ...
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The singular Agrippina named in the title of this release is actually three women by that name, all related. The most famous is Julia Agrippina, the daughter of the Roman general Germanicus and the mother of Nero, but the lives of her mother and aunt also furnished rich material for Baroque operatic librettists. It's commonplace to observe that Baroque audiences knew the history of ancient Rome in a way that's hard to imagine today, but it has not been so common to translate this wisdom into an album programming concept, and that's just what mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg and her husband, musicologist Holger Schmitt-Hallenberg, accomplish here, with the latter unearthing a host of virtually unknown Agrippina arias. The most famous Agrippina is Handel's, composed in 1709 and the highlight of his sojourn in Italy. It is well represented here, and its representation of its scheming heroine would have been known to many Baroque audiences. But compare Handel's treatment of Julia Agrippina with that of...
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