Ruby Hughes / Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment / Laurence Cummings HANDEL'S LAST PRIMA DONNA

The Borletti-Buitoni Trust has helped bring to fruition another interesting music project, this time for British soprano Ruby Hughes ( 2014 BBT award winner) who pays tribute to Handel’s last prima donna , the Italian soprano Giulia Frasi . For her debut recording on the Chandos label Ruby has chosen a selection of celebrated music composed for Frasi by Handel from his last works Susanna, Solomon Theodora and Jephtha plus other composers of the era whose works are much less familiar, including several modern premieres . The recording was made with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Laurence Cummings and will be released on 2 March 2018 , in time for International Women’s Day (8 March) and Ruby’s recital A Celebration of Frasi on 7 April at the London Handel Festival. 

Ruby Hughes has a particular affinity with music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods and, while exploring further her favourite Handel roles, she discovered that most of them had been composed for Frasi. Her investigation into the life and work of this Italian soprano, whose London career spanned over three decades, was aided by musicologist and Handel specialist David Vickers , who se research into Frasi’s career helped Ruby choose the music for the album.

Giulia Frasi, noted for her remarkably clear, sweet voice and precise English diction, arrived in London as a young singer in 1742 to join Lord Middlesex ’s Italian Opera Company. She was soon noticed by Handel and from 1748 became the principal soprano in all his oratorios at Covent Garden until his death in 1759 . Her star rose to the highest ranks of the London musical scene and she also worked for charitable causes, singing in the annual performances of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital (from 1750) , the annual charity concerts at the King’s Theatre in aid of the Fund for Decay’d Musicians and Their Families (later the Royal Society of Musicians ), and nine consecutive meetings of the Three Choirs Festival.

In addition to working regularly for Handel, Frasi appeared in Italian operas by Galuppi, Porpora, Gluck, Hasse, Ciampi and Terradellas (a neglected period of London opera history) and she worked frequently with English composers, most notably Thomas Arne, William Boyce and Philip Hayes, and also und er the co-direction of John Stanley and John Christopher Smith (Handel’s joint successors of oratorio concert season s at Covent Garden). 

As well as possessing a voice similarly praised for its beauty and clarity, Ruby also has an empathy with the vividly dramatic roles Frasi championed - women reacting to distressing events with virtuous

dignity and selflessness, such as the nobly blameless and chaste title-heroines in Susanna and Theodora and the valiant Iphis in Handel’s last oratorio Jephtha. Besides roles of moral stoicism and pathos, another side to Frasi’s dramatic colours is evident in roles of seductive temptresses in Arne’s Judgem ent of Paris and Handel’s The Choice of Hercules.

Ruby Hughes comments: “I have become utterly fascinated by Frasi, an ambitious and indomitable woman who so inspired Handel in his last years . I believe that, with this CD, we have captured the diversity of changing styles, tastes and activities in mid-eighteenth century musical culture as well as provided a remarkable insight into the career of Giulia Frasi.”