Idyll & Intrigue
Friday, May 21 at 7:30 pm
Virtual broadcast
Our penultimate program of the season features a delightful cantata a due by the youthful George Frideric Handel.
A 1708 commission from the Arcadian Academy, Aminta e Fillide tells the story of two lovers who need a little help from Cupid. Handel fleshes out this endearing pastoral courtship for two voices and strings with great panache and charm. Its arias proved so popular that he reused some of them the very next year in Agrippina.
Join us for this timeless retelling of an ageless love story, featuring sopranos Lauren Snouffer and Abigail Fischer.
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Concert Information
On the program
G. F. Handel, Aminta e Fillide
Run time
60 minutes, no intermission
Watch: Concert & Conversations | Idyll & Intrigue Preview Discussion with Abigail Fischer
About the Artists
Artist Reviews
“With her dramatic tumble of red hair and cello-mellow voice, Ms. Fischer sings with a passionate restraint that has no equal in her generation. You didn’t want her to stop.”
- New York Times
“Soprano Lauren Snouffer sang with elegance and fine range, her diction immaculate, her pitch accurate. Never did she waver, her energetic performance resounding with confident luster and grace.”
- Opera Wire
About the Composer
George Frideric Handel. attributed to Balthasar Denner, oil on canvas, feigned oval, 1726-1728
National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG 1976.
The biographical literature on Handel is substantial, and includes several recently published volumes that add considerably to our picture of one of the most popular of Baroque composers. Ellen T. Harris’s Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (2001) offers insight into the world of Handel's private patrons in Rome during the era when he composed “Aminta e Fillide." A thoughtful and groundbreaking piece of scholarship, this book documents a homosocial environment, in which tales of an imaginary pastoral world provided metaphorical language for the love that dare not speak its name. San Francisco Opera recently published an interview with Harris.
Harris’s more recent George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends (2014) tells the story of the composer's life and work through the witness of his many friends and colleagues. From these personal relationships Harris creates a nuanced picture of a famously private man. David Hunter’s The Lives of George Frideric Handel (2015) constructs, finally, a detailed picture of life in eighteenth-century London from a broader range of source material. Hunter gives an especially detailed account of Handel's finances, including the multiple bankruptcies of the Royal Academy of Music, whose leaders (including Handel) invested for several years in the African slave trade. Shortly after his book’s publication, Hunter provided to Musicology Now a brief summary of his findings on the latter issue, whose legacy we are still working to overcome.
