A COUNTERTENOR WHO KNOWS
WHERE THE POWER LIVES

Key’mon Murrah and Les Talens Lyriques turn
familiar Handel into something freshly urgent

Les Talens Lyriques

The program announced the obvious: nine arias from Giulio Cesare, Serse, Ariodante, and Rinaldo. The Handel greatest hits, the ones every countertenor records and every audience already knows. Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques had something to prove.

They did.

Rousset led fourteen musicians from the harpsichord, as always, and the instrumental interludes refused to behave like intermissions. A Rodrigo Passacaille moved with coiled authority. One of the Opus 3 Concerti grossi filled Zipper Hall’s intimate room with a vibrant plushness that made the case for historically informed performance more persuasively than any argument could. Rousset has been devoted to Handel since a teenage epiphany at a 1978 Aix-en-Provence performance of Alcina, and it shows. He knows where the music wants to go and gets there without fuss.

Key’mon Murrah

Countertenor Key’mon Murrah belongs to the American school of countertenor singing, which bets on volume and projection, and his voice is built to win that bet. The lower register reaches toward baritone. The middle has density and color, dark at the core, with a richness that accumulates rather than announces itself. The top emerges from all of that without a seam, landing in soprano territory with more voltage than most sopranos carry. His is not a voice of one exquisite gear. He has many.

He wore the evening lightly. The music he made was anything but.

The first group of Sesto arias, “Svegliatevi” and “L’angue offeso,” was where the limits of the American school showed their cost. Verbal clarity and consonantal punch were largely absent, and those pieces run on exactly that fuel. Sesto lives in forward motion and sharp edges. One was reminded, not unkindly, of the late Joan Sutherland, who never met a consonant she liked.

The evening found its deeper register elsewhere. A pleasingly unhackneyed “Dopo notte” and a stunningly flamboyant “Venti, turbini” supplied the fireworks. Then “Scherza infida” arrived. Murrah sang it with a grief so unguarded it brought tears to my eyes. The “Ombra mai fu” had set the quieter terms earlier: stately phrasing, piano effects of real delicacy, no trace of the warhorse. He earned the familiarity. Then he transcended it.

The encore settled the account. “La Giustizia,” the same Sesto character’s fiery closing number, arrived like a different singer entirely: every consonant a small detonation, the phrasing driven by ferocious vigor rather than smoothed over by it. Sutherland, one imagines, would have approved of the result even if the method was foreign to her. The house erupted in cheers.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

photos courtesy of LA Opera

Handelian Heroes
Les Talens Lyriques / Key’mon Murrah
presented by LA Opera; part of OperaFest LA
Zipper Hall at The Colburn School in Los Angeles
reviewed May 24, 2026
for more events, call 213.972.8001 or visit LA Opera

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦