Aci, Galatea e Polifemo by Emmanuelle Haim

Emmanuelle Haim directed this Handel’s cantata/serenata with the orchestration by Le Concert d’Astree in 2003.

Contralto, Sara Mingardo sang Galatea. She’s impressively wonderful as always. 

Soprano, Sandrine Piau sang Aci. As the same way as Mingardo, she is also exquisite as singer. Her singing is impressively mature and her pearl-like rich voice is very beautiful, which matched well with Sara Mingardo’s.  But at times, her high soprano notes sounded overly ornamented a little in this production.

Bass, Laurent Naouri sang Polifemo with warm beautiful deep rich bass voice. He’s also very mature singer and sang very well.  And because of these reasons, his Polifemo also felt less scary and less dramatic.

Comparing to the first rate quality of these singers, the quality of Haim’s orchestration was somewhat downgraded though they played very well. I expected her music to be vibrant, agile and muscularly tight as her later works. So it was little surprised that her music was much softer and less focused. It is very understandable because this was her first recording production.