The buzz surrounding this album has to do with the startling voice of Samuel Mariño, but it has other attractions as well in the form of pieces that might have been heard at a London concert mounted jointly by Handel and Gluck in 1746. The album bills Mariño as a "male soprano," a term he has used in his own publicity. How does he do it? Nobody is saying. Mariño is a product of Venezuela's still strong musical education system, and he was 27 years old when this album appeared in 2020. Buyers can amuse themselves by setting up blind hearing tests for their friends: it is an open question of how many of them will identify the singer as male. Mariño especially excels in the brutal passagework of the arias by the hotshot young Gluck. These are virtuoso arias, from the years before Gluck simplified the operatic language with his reforms and pointed the way directly to Mozart. They are in the nature of an extreme extension of the old style, and to hear them taken on by a young singer who can handle them offers excitement galore. The Gluck operas excerpted -- Antigono, La Sofonisba, La corona, and Il tigrane -- are all but unknown, and the Handel operas aren't much more familiar. This is all to the good, but the main attraction is Mariño's voice, and the Händelfestspieleorchester Halle under Michael Hofstetter has the good sense to stay out of his way.
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