Written in 1740, when interest in his operas was waning and he was beginning to embrace other forms far more, Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato defies simple categorisation. It could ...

George Frideric Handel (1685—1759) was a bit of a larger-than- life character whose music, and its importance, could stand a bit of Reason, that period between the 1620s and the 1780s when the social, ...

Handel composed “L’Allego, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” and it was first performed in 1740. At the suggestion of Handel’s librettist Charles Jennens, Milton’s two poems, “L’Allegro” and “il Penseroso, ...

Last night’s concert had the appeal of being both a major work and one decidedly neglected in contemporary performance. Handel’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato is an oratorio that sits kicking ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. During the Great Frost of 1740, while the Thames froze, Handel was not idle. As though to shut the winter out ...

Merriment and Milton are hardly synonymous, but the poet who penned Paradise Lost also inspired George Frideric Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which concludes "Mirth, with thee we ...

Jane Glover conducts the English National Opera orchestra with verve in Handel’s baroque pastoral ode to the poetry of John Milton. This inventive dance piece by Mark Morris dates from 1988. Sometimes ...

It doesn't get better than this. L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Mark Morris's masterpiece, is back in Britain after more than a decade. It's still glorious: one of the finest works of ...

He made it in 1988, just as he changed from being a promising choreographer working with limited means into a powerful theatre director with the unlimited resources of the Belgium National Opera House ...

Instead of Béjart’s slickly sexy, stripped-down divinities of modern ballet, Morris gave the audience chubby, barefoot, all-sorts dancers naively skipping and slapping each others’ bottoms; instead of ...