Artist Equivalence: Robin Blaze did not co-write anything with George Frederick Handel

[Hans_Valeton]

Very strange: Robin Blaze, the counter-tenor, has his own composer page listing quite a number of compositions by George Frederick Handel

Some of these he “composed” on his own:

And some he seems to have co-written together with Handel:

Now I think I can fix these myself but I just thought it would be wise to let you know these mix-ups (still) exist and pop up quite frequently.

[Ludwig (Ludwig van Marbach)]

It could as easily be your file tags causing this. Are you sure Robin is never in the Composer field by mistake?

[Hans_Valeton]

Yes, I’m quite sure. There is however an album with an oratorio by Handel on which Robin Blaze sings.

[Geoff_Coupe]

Can you post details of this album please?

I’m not seeing Blaze listed as a composer in my Library, or being confused with Handel. That Ensemble Amarillis album is in my library, and there are no issues with it…

[Hans_Valeton]

On the Composer tab of Robin Blaze’s artist page, when I select all 223 (sic!) of his compositions, click Edit and then, in the Composition Editor, click on the Remove button on the right of Composer Links, I see the following:

(By the way: I did not (yet) remove any links)
So there’s even more confusion going on.

I did find an Elgar composition among these 223 compositions of Robin and this is an Overture by Händel that’s been transribed by Elgar and so this work has two composers, one of them is Robin, the other Elgar:

An then, when I navigate to the actual album this Elgar transcription of the Händel overture is on, I find it to be unidentified so the composer attribution to Robin Blaze must have come from Roon metadata, seeing as my own file tags look like this:

There is however one thing I hadn’t noticed before, and that’s the fact that my spelling of Händel’s name differs from the English spelling Roon uses. My assumption is that Roon translates my spelling into theirs by way of some sort of alias, somewhere under the hood, because I can’t find any aka’s in the composer’s description.

I’ve just checked and all of the albums in my library that contain “compositions” by Robin Blaze are unidentified.

Does any of this make any sense to any of you?

[Hans_Valeton]

@Geoff_Coupe

Can you post details of this album please?

If you tell me what kind of details you are looking for, I’d be happy to supply them.

[Geoff_Coupe]

A screenshot of the Album page would be sufficient, thanks.

BTW - I note that for the Amarillis album, you have Nederlands text for the titles - mine are English… Curious to know why this should be…

[Hans_Valeton]

Here’s the screenshot:

The Dutch titles com from my file tags as this is yet another unidentified album.
Perhaps, when I’m finally ready having Roon identifying the remainder of my unidentified albums (at this moment more than 3 thousand to go), this Robin Blaze problem will suddenly disappear?

[Geoff_Coupe]

Unidentified? Have you tried to manually identify it in Roon - because Roon/Qobuz certainly knows about it…

[Hans_Valeton]

When i try to manually identify this Amarillis album, this one is proposed:

This tells me that the Roon (TiVo) database contains only the header info of this album and no album art or track info.

After identification the album page looks like this:

Not much different…
Still all tracks are composed by Robin Blaze.

[Geoff_Coupe]

Well, all I can say is that I used Roon to identify it - and it knows it…

[Hans_Valeton]

And when you re-identify this particular album, @Geoff_Coupe , do you get the same screen as I did, as shown in my earlier post:

@Hans_Valeton

When i try to manually identify this Amarillis album, this one is proposed:

====
EDIT

I just folowed up on my own hint about the spelling and changed the value of the composer tag in my own files to George Frederick Handel (instead of Georg Friedrich Händel), and guess what?

No more Mr. Blaze!

[Geoff_Coupe]

Nope.

[Hans_Valeton]

Thanks for trying that out for me., @Geoff_Coupe!
I will try it once more, now that I’ve changed the composer in my file tags to the English spelling. (see the part after EDIT in my earlier post)
By the way, could the fact that your album apparently comes from Qobuz cause the differences between what you and I get to see while identifying?

Some time later:
Neither MusicBrainz nor Allmusic.com seem to have this particular album in their databases:
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/cd10fc54-5b2d-488f-85ec-bb1b5e3c93b1?all=1
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/ensemble-amarillis-mn0001951775/discography/all
So maybe the metadata that are shown in your screenshot actually come from Qobuz?