When I first started attending opera Handel was a rarity, still unfairly weighed down by the fusty, mothballed performance tradition of oratorio. Nowadays there are few parts of Handel’s huge dramatic output that don’t get a regular outing, and even oratorio has taken to the stage with huge success – witness the triumph of Theodora and Saul. But every now and then a new recording emerges which gives a timely reminder that there are fresh discoveries still to be made, and original lines of interpretation and analysis to be drawn. Such is the case with Musica Gloria’s showcasing of the Chandos Anthems.
These date from a crucial transitional period in Handel’s career when he is still seeking to find his feet in England after his Italianate youth, but well before the final formation of his style in opera and oratorio. In these years one of his key supporters was the Duke of Chandos, politician, builder and dubious investor, now better remembered for his patronage and for the way that parts of his vast stately home, Cannons, ended up incorporated into other houses after its demolition.
Handel’s eleven anthems from 1717-18, have been eclipsed in public appreciation by his later Coronation Anthems, and yet they give a far better insight into his later development as both a vocal and instrumental composer. They offer, in fact, an unexpected parallel to Bach’s career. Just as he was able to experiment at Köthen with superior private instrumental and choral resources, so Handel could lay the foundations of many of the key features of his mature style with the help of accomplished colleagues. In these two anthems and an instrumental concerto from the Chandos era we see him trying out various instrumental and vocal combinations that he was to use to great effect in later years. While there are traces of Purcell’s influence in some of the deliciously scrunchy chromaticism of the instrumental writing, there is also clear evidence of the bold assertive contrapuntal writing for voices and orchestra that come to resplendent fruition in the 1730s.
Here, though, we have works on a more intimate scale, designed for the Duke’s private church, a building that still stands. There are two singers per part in the choral numbers and a band of eight players. The sound has great immediacy courtesy of a former Baroque church in Antwerp. You feel very much inside a concert experience, rather than listening remotely, and this is a great help given the variety of moods expressed in the mostly short numbers that comprise each anthem. There is an excellently precise, but not clinical, balance between the instrumental and vocal lines, and between the voices themselves in the elaborately concerted sections.
These works are, in their sacred aesthetic a world away from Bach’s cantatas, to which they bear some formal resemblance. Handel, the sensuous man of the theatre, is never far away; and this is very much Anglican rather than Lutheran music. The first anthem, The Lord is my Light is full of naturalistic effects and that tone of joyful celebration and confident aspiration that is unique to this composer. Particular highlights are the pastoral dialogue of tenor and recorders, ‘One thing I have desired,’ and the rumbustious depiction of thunder, lightning and earthquakes in ‘For who is God but the Lord.’
The second anthem, As pants the Hart, a setting of Psalm 42,is altogether more solemn and meditative. There are a couple of very fine laments where alto and then tenor are matched in dialogue with oboe and violin and time seems suspended before the chorus gathers all the human threads together for a reiteration of trust in God, a destination that anticipates the cumulative affirmative power of the oratorios.
Between these two outer layers lies a sleek sliver of an oboe concerto from the same period where the oboe line is often a ‘song without words. This work not only anticipates the grander works in this genre he wrote in later years, but also acts as an apt palate cleanser between the two vocal works, just as Handel tended to programme things in his own public concerts.
Technically this disc offers very accomplished singing and playing with the exception of one solo aria with unexpectedly squally intonation early on. There are a couple of authentic novelties to note too. The keyboard deployed is a claviorganum which can switch from harpsichord to organ as Handel himself preferred. Also detectable is an attempt at historically informed English pronunciation, which can at times sound a little like Kenneth Williams’ Rambling Syd Rumpo, but is not a major impediment.
Overall, this is a wholly absorbing and persuasive disc that directs attention to an unjustly neglected part of this composer’s output at a key point in his creative formation.
Etcetera Records
Composer: Georg Friedrich Handel
Musica Gloria
Director: Beniamino Paganini
Oboist: Nele Vertommen
Photo Credit: Malou Van den Heuvel