Il Pomo d'Oro's Giulio Cesare Has the Rarest Thing in Baroque Opera: A Cleopatra Who Actually Earns the Superlatives

Devieilhe's Cleopatra is the kind of performance that reorders your mental hierarchy of a role. The rest of the cast isn't far behind.

Handel's Giulio Cesare is the busiest real estate in the Baroque opera catalogue — fifteen current recordings means every new entrant needs a reason to exist beyond completionism. Il Pomo d'Oro's version, led from the harpsichord by Francesco Corti, earns its place honestly: it comes off a European tour, and you can hear it. Live-performance residue is a real thing, and it's here in the willingness to take risks in da capo ornamentation and in the recitatives, where Corti's harpsichord sits forward in the mix rather than retreating into wallpaper. Jakub Józef Orliński's Caesar is the kind of countertenor performance that divides listeners cleanly. His tuning wobbles occasionally, but the character reads: imperious and impetuous, never fussy. The hunting aria Va tacito e nascosto, with Christian Binde's natural horn threading through the texture, is precisely the moment where this Caesar earns its keep — the music's coiled patience suits Orliński's energy better than the pure pyrotechnics of Al lampo dell'armi, where he executes the vocal gymnastics without quite making them feel inevitable. The supporting cast is a cut above average for this repertoire. Beth Taylor's Cornelia is genuinely affecting — velvet-toned where so many mezzos go plummy and static in the grief arias, with real dynamic shading rather than just sustained beauty. Rebecca Leggett's Sesto has snap and forward motion. Yuriy Mynenko's Tolomeo commits fully to the unhinged register, switching vocal characters with the kind of controlled abandon the role needs. Alex Rosen brings unusual weight to Achilla without overplaying the villain. And then there's Sabine Devieilhe. V'adoro, pupille — Cleopatra's seduction aria, one of the most famous pieces in the entire Handel canon — lands here as well as it has on any recording. The pianissimos are genuinely breathtaking in the technical sense: she is doing something with breath control and tone placement that shouldn't be possible at that dynamic level. Piangerò la sorte mia, her lament in Act III, is the other test, and Devieilhe passes it by not doing the obvious thing. Where some sopranos swell into the grief, she makes it small and concentrated, which is somehow more devastating. Corti's tempos are in the same neighborhood as Harry Bicket's recent Linn recording but feel faster in practice — this is a conducting personality question more than a metronome one. His choices drive drama rather than showcase craft, which is the right priority for a three-hour opera that needs forward momentum to survive without cuts. The harpsichord continuo is active without being intrusive, and the period instruments have the rougher edge that suits Handel's martial sections without sacrificing line in the lyric ones. The question any new Giulio Cesare recording has to answer is: why this one over the Christie, the Jacobs, the Bicket? The honest answer here is Devieilhe, full stop, but that undersells a genuinely well-assembled ensemble recording that benefits from something most studio sessions lack — the memory of an audience.