We are delighted to announce that Cambridge PhD graduate Natassa Varka has won the 2019 International Handel Research Prize for her doctoral thesis ‘Charles Jennens's collection of Handel's sacred oratorios from Saul to Jephtha: sources, contexts, and revisions’. This examination of an unusual and comprehensive collection of Handel's music owned by one of Handel’s librettists combines detailed source studies with a consideration of the oratorios' place in the political and religious contexts of the mid-eighteenth century.
The prize, awarded biennially by the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft for outstanding research on the life and work of Handel, was recently presented to Dr Varka by the president of the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hirschmann (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), at the conference accompanying the Halle Festival.