Customer Reviews

Handel: Love Duets

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Handel arias are so lyrical, verging on the sweet, that it is possible to overdose on them. But I love them, and these two voices are as good as it gets in Baroque music.

An absolutely wonderful program of Handel operatic arias and duets, sung with great style by two underrated artists. This is one of my favorite albums of all time. The duet from Rodelinda is in itself worth the price of the disc, a sublime performance if there ever was one. Susie LeBlanc also pulls off one of the best recordings of the famous aria from Rinaldo, "Lascia Ch'io Pianga". Daniel Taylor has one of the most attractive countertenor voices to be heard today. An essential addition to any collection of Handel opera arias.

These songs are among the most beautiful ever crafted; songs that lay bare the truest truism and the one for which we most often dearly wish to be true: there is love, a perfect love, a perfect expressed love . . . and here it is: the songs of George Friederic Handel presented to us by Suzie LeBlanc and Stephen Stubbs.

Oblique and loath as you are to sounds more than a week past their date of release or interrupted from your Jane's Addiction listening by this, you will be caught by the heart the very moment Suzie LeBlanc begins to tease down the tears from heaven. Suzie LeBlanc - the one to whom I would point to confess the true creative genius of our heavenly father - is very well matched with Stephen Stubbs, whose voice rises and falls and plays about the soavemente curlings of Suzie LeBlanc with the nearest perfection I can name.

"Io t'abbraccio" will do as it promises; you will feel the embrace and you will never feel anything so perfect again in you lifetime. This CD is a masterpiece, and the songs are as fresh at this very moment as they were nearly 300 years before today.