Everything Rewinds presents contemporary adaptations of arias by George Frideric Handel through new texts, electronic production, and AI-assisted performance. In Baroque opera, the aria often served as a moment of suspension, isolating and extending a single emotional state. These adaptations retain that focus, translating each aria’s underlying emotional condition into a contemporary musical context.
The selection spans a range of moods—stillness, expectation, care, rupture, and disorientation—organized not as narrative but as a progression of states. At the same time, the album explores variation in style, texture, and instrumentation, reflecting the diversity of Handel’s works while situating them within a contemporary listening framework. Rather than arrangements or covers, these tracks are best understood as continuations: new works shaped by older ones.
Ombra mai fu
from Serse (1738)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Libretto: Nicola Francesco Haym, after Silvio Stampiglia
At the beginning of the opera, Xerxes admires the shade of a plane tree. What appears at first to be a conventional pastoral image becomes an expression of stillness, gratitude, and quiet contemplation. The aria suspends dramatic action in favor of a single sustained emotional condition.
This adaptation preserves the aria's atmosphere of stillness while shifting its focus inward. The tree becomes a more abstract presence: a memory, a trace, or a lingering absence. The music's sense of suspension remains, but the object of contemplation becomes less tangible and more psychological.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
by Nicola Francesco Haym, after Silvio Stampiglia
Where’er You Walk
from Semele (1744)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: William Congreve
Jupiter promises to shape the world around Semele into a place of comfort and ease. The aria imagines care through transformed environment: softened air, shade, and stillness become extensions of emotional attention.
This adaptation reduces the aria’s pastoral idealization into a quieter and more immediate gesture of reassurance. Rather than constructing paradise, the speaker attempts simply to lessen resistance and difficulty.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
William Congreve
Cara speme
from Giulio Cesare (1724)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Nicola Francesco Haym
Caesar addresses hope itself as a sustaining emotional force amid uncertainty and separation. The aria suspends outward action in favor of inward expectation and emotional persistence.
The adaptation preserves the aria’s delicacy while removing its heroic framework. Hope becomes quieter and less triumphant: a faint but recurring orientation within obscurity.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Nicola Francesco Haym
Verdi prati
from Alcina (1735)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Antonio Fanzaglia
Ruggiero contemplates the fading beauty of Alcina’s enchanted island, realizing that its splendor is temporary and illusory. The aria reflects on impermanence and inevitable dissolution.
The adaptation translates the aria’s meditation on transience into the language of temporal reversal and perceptual collapse. Beauty becomes unstable not through destruction alone, but through gradual undoing and return.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Antonio Fanzaglia
V’adoro pupille
from Giulio Cesare (1724)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Nicola Francesco Haym
Cleopatra stages an elaborate spectacle of seduction for Caesar. The aria unfolds as an atmosphere of enchantment, attraction, and suspended perception.
The adaptation strips away theatrical ornament and transforms seduction into a quieter form of attraction. Movement occurs less through spectacle than through gradual gravitational pull.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Nicola Francesco Haym
Lascia ch’io pianga
from Rinaldo (1711)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Giacomo Rossi, after Aaron Hill
Almirena laments her captivity and pleads for freedom from suffering. The aria combines grief, resignation, and restrained longing for release.
The adaptation shifts the aria away from imprisonment toward emotional exhaustion and inward pressure. Freedom becomes less physical than psychological.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Giacomo Rossi, after Aaron Hill
Scherza infida
from Ariodante (1735)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Antonio Salvi
Ariodante believes himself betrayed and abandoned by Ginevra. The aria unfolds as extended grief suspended between disbelief and despair.
The adaptation compresses the aria’s devastation into restrained withdrawal and altered atmosphere. The emphasis falls less on betrayal than on the emotional vacancy left behind.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Pena tiranna
from Amadigi di Gaula (1715)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Nicola Francesco Haym
Dardano reflects on unrelieved suffering and emotional torment. The aria sustains tension through suspended melodic motion and unresolved longing.
The adaptation internalizes the aria’s emotional pressure into perceptual suspension and incomplete formation. Time itself begins to feel stretched, delayed, and unstable.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Nicola Francesco Haym
Piangerò la sorte mia
from Giulio Cesare (1724)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Nicola Francesco Haym
Cleopatra believes herself abandoned and facing death. The aria alternates between lamentation and imagined vengeance before returning to grief.
The adaptation removes the aria’s dramatic extremity and focuses instead on subtle relational instability. Absence appears not as catastrophe but as gradual emotional displacement.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Nicola Francesco Haym
Total Eclipse
from Samson (1743)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Newburgh Hamilton, after John Milton
Blind and imprisoned, Samson reflects on the loss of sight and the collapse of orientation. The aria meditates on darkness, isolation, and perceptual disappearance.
The adaptation transforms blindness into broader perceptual dissolution. The world loses contour, coherence, and stable reference rather than merely visual clarity.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Newburgh Hamilton, after John Milton
Dove sei
from Rodelinda (1725)
Music: George Frideric Handel
Text: Nicola Francesco Haym
Bertarido mourns separation from Rodelinda and searches emotionally across absence and uncertainty. The aria sustains longing through restrained repetition and suspended motion.
The adaptation shifts the aria into the language of signal, trace, and unresolved communication. Presence persists only as intermittent impression.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury
Nicola Francesco Haym
Chaconne in G Major
from Suite in G Major, HWV 435
Music: George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel's Chaconne in G Major, HWV 435, is one of his most celebrated keyboard works. Built upon a repeating bass line and harmonic progression, it unfolds through twenty-one continuous variations that transform the same musical material in increasingly inventive ways. Composed between 1705 and 1717, it was first published in 1733 as part of Handel's Suites de Pièces.
The adaptation treats repetition itself as emotional process. Familiar structures persist while their internal relations slowly shift, producing change through accumulation rather than rupture.
By Rodolphe El-Khoury