Ann Mackay - Handel: Silete venti, Agrippina condotta a morire (1991)

Into the clean, relaxedly idiomatic playing of the European Community Chamber Orchestra, the sweet, boyish voice of their Guest Singer of the Year 1990 enters, stilling the equinoctial winds at the start of Handel's Silete venti. So far, so good. Ann Mackay's voice is, as ever, intelligent and true. But it also reveals itself as somewhat matt of surface and less than lively of imagination, as the motet continues with an ardent, implicitly (that is, harmonically) erotic plea to be pierced through by Christ. Her tender placing of each note, and her deftly turned ornamentation stop short of biting against Handel's harmonies, and although Mackay is agile enough in the presto ''Alleluia'', its sequences unfold only blandly.
It is something of a relief to have this programme broken up and signed off by two Handel overtures, Rinaldo and Flavio. They are not outstandingly played, but are dutifully vibrato-free and ventilated by an engaging oboe solo.
For Agrippina condotta a morire, Mackay sounds more keenly engaged. This secular cantata, written when Handel was household musician to a Roman nobleman has, as TK points out in her apposite sleeve-note, the lilting melody and structural drama of a true operatic scena. Mackay, with renewed energy and considerable grace, focuses on its shifting emotions from vengeance to tenderness, from fury to love and back again, even if her vacillations of temperament are less powerful than in Handel's writing.'