The Handel Opera Project presents George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Samson, composed in the same year as Messiah. London’s decades-long craze for Italian opera was in steep decline, and Handel was increasingly occupied with the English oratorio genre that he had perfected: “A musical Drama, whose Subject must be Scriptural, and in which the solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the stage” – as Newburgh Hamilton, Samson’s librettist, described it.
Samson, “Alter’d and adapted to the Stage from the Samson Agonistes of John Milton,” was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on February 18, 1743, and Mr. Handel revived it no fewer than thirty times over the next fifteen years – a total exceeded only by Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus.
The cast for Samson includes Gabriel Cohen in the title role, with a supporting cast including Sara Couden, Jayne Diliberto, Daphné Touchais, Wayne Wong, Caleb Alexander, Michael Orlinsky, Reuben Zellman, and Katherine Gray. Handel Opera Project founder William G. Ludtke conducts his arrangement of Samson in the exquisite space of Bernard Maybeck’s masterpiece, the First Church of Christ, Scientist.