René Jacobs - Handel: Saul (2005)

There have been great Sauls -- Charles Mackerras' on Archiv and Peter Neumann on Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm. There have been acceptable Sauls -- Paul McCreesh's on Archiv and Mogens Wöldike's on Vanguard and Philip Ledger's on Virgin. There have been deeply flawed Sauls -- John Eliot Gardiner's on Philips and Nikolaus Harnoncourt's on Teldec. There have even been downright poor Sauls, but they're not worth mentioning. ThisSaul by René Jacobs with the Concerto Köln and the RIAS-Kammerchor is easily as good as the best and maybe even better. Jacobs has done splendid things with Handel in his Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo but his Saul is as good and maybe even better. Jacobs seems to go even deeper into this work's fusion of the grandly public and the deeply private, of the enormously heroic and the immensely tragic, of the entirely political and the absolutely personal. His cast is superb from top -- and there are a lot of female and male sopranos in Saul -- to bottom -- bass Gidon Saks is nearly in the same league as Fischer-Dieskau was in the otherwise mediocre Harnoncourt recording. The RIAS-Kammerchor is supple and strong, the Concerto Köln is powerful, sensitive, and colorful, and Harmonia Mundi's sound is clear and warm. With arguably better sound than Mackerras and possibly a better cast than Neumann, Jacobs may have the best Saul available. -- James Leonard