Handel: Tamerlano.

* Bacelli, Norberg-Schulz, Bonitatibus; Randle Pushee, Abete; The English Concert, Pinnock. Text and translations. AVIE 0001 (www.ludwigvanweb.com)

To say that only recent events make this new recording of Handel's Tamerlano, an opera concerned with Middle Eastern rulers at war, such a gripping performance would be to overlook the hard-won authority of this amazing score, written right after Giulio Cesare and before Rodelinda--a compositional triple-punch as impressive as Verdi's sequence of Rigoletto, La Traviata and Il Trovatore. Tamerlano's 1724 premiere starred such Baroque-era idols as Francesca Cuzzoni and Senesino; for Francesco Borzoni, who sang the doomed Bajazet, Handel composed tenor music so ravishingly dramatic that it sounded the death knell of the castrato as star not only of this work but of operas for centuries to come.

Certainly this Tamerlano, taken by the new recording company Avie from live performances (all enthusiastically reviewed by OPERA NEWS) in Halle, Paris and London last year, is impressively played and often richly felt. Handelian Trevor Pinnock is not so well-known for conducting operas; his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1988, Handel's Giulio Cesare, was conscientiously played but thrilling only when Tatiana Troyanos sang--with such dashing authority that fans at the Met stage door greeted her after performances with "Hail, Caesar!" Thirteen years later, Pinnock has gained a deeper understanding of how pace and color animate what some listeners bemoan as ...