‘Handel in Rome’ is the debut solo recording on Linn Records from soprano Nardus Williams. First performed on tour in March 2023, this album was recorded in early 2024.

‘Handel’s arrival in Rome, just short of his 22nd birthday, seems to have had a miraculous influence on his development as a composer. Although he was already familiar with Lutheran musical rigour and expression, and had already performed two operas in Hamburg, there was something about the environment of Rome that ignited the most productive period of his development. He worked with some of the greatest musicians of the age, such as the violinist-composer Arcangelo Corelli and the soprano Margherita Durastanti, and he enjoyed the favours of major patrons of the arts, such as Cardinals Pietro Ottoboni and Benedetto Pamphili and the Marquis Francesco Ruspoli. But there also seems to have been an intangible factor, one that might lie somewhere between the excessive luxury and sensuality of the clerical aristocracy and the moralizing denial of the trappings of beauty that the very same figures preached’.