Composer: George Frideric Handel
Performer: Susan Gritton, Thomas Hobbs, Iestyn Davies, Trinity College Choir Cambridge
Orchestra: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Conductor: Stephen Layton
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Hyperion
Catalogue: CDA67926
Release: 2013
Size: 1.27 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
O Come, Let Us Sing unto the Lord “Chandos Anthem No. 8”, HWV 253
01. I. Sonata. Largo – Allegro
02. II. O Come, Let Us Sing unto the Lord
03. III. O Come, Let Us Worship
04. IV. Glory and Worship Are Before Him
05. V. Tell It Out Among the Heathen That the Lord Is King
06. VI. O Magnify the Lord
07. VII. The Lord Preserveth the Souls of the Saints
08. VIII. For Look as High as the Heaven Is
09. IX. There Is Sprung Up a Light for the Righteous
As Pants the Hart “Chandos Anthem No. 6a”, HWV 251b
10. I. Sonata. Larghetto – Allegro
11. II. As Pants the Hart for Cooling Streams
12. III. Tears Are My Daily Food
13. IV. Now When I Think Thereupon
14. V. In the Voice of Praise and Thanksgiving
15. VI. Why So Full of Grief, O My Soul?
16. VII. Put Thy Trust in God
I Will Magnify Thee, O God “Chandos Anthem No. 5a”, HWV 250a
17. I. Sonata. Andante – Allegro
18. II. I Will Magnify Thee, O God
19. III. Ev’ry Day Will I Give Thanks unto Thee
20. IV. One Generation Shall Praise Thy Works unto Another
21. V. The Lord Preserveth All Them That Love Him
22. VI. The Lord Is Righteous in All His Ways
23. VII. Happy Are the People That Are in Such a Case
24. VIII. My Mouth Shall Speak the Praise of the Lord
Handel’s beautiful, intimate settings of liturgical texts written for the First Duke of Chandos are among his less well-known choral works—and are proved by this second volume from Trinity also to be among his loveliest. They are a perfect example of the composer’s English style heard in Acis & Galatea and oratorios such as Judas Maccabaeus.
The soloists on this recording include internationally acclaimed Handelians Susan Gritton and Iestyn Davies, and the young tenor Thomas Hobbs, whose warm, lyrical tone is perfect for this repertoire. Trinity College Choir Cambridge sing with their usual youthful exuberance tempered with elegance, style and precision, under the expert guidance of Stephen Layton.
George Frideric Handel’s Chandos Anthems, Anglican service music written in the late 1710s for the Duke of Chandos, mark the first flowering of what became the instantly identifiable but impossible-to-copy Handelian style, with grand structures built up in almost imperceptible but inevitable steps from a harmonically restricted set of materials through sheer manipulations of the flow of time. The three pieces follow roughly the same pattern, with an instrumental introduction, a spacious opening chorus, a solo proceeding from the chorus’s main pitch classes, intervening polyphonic choral movements, finally a more chromatic and deeper solo, and a final fugue. Plenty of conductors have deployed enormous Messiah-sized groups in this music, and it can work reasonably well. But they’re of a smaller scale than Handel’s great public choral masterpieces, and they’re more amenable to the medium-sized, precise work accomplished here by conductor Stephen Layton, leading the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge and the veteran Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Layton’s specialty is text intelligibility, and for native English speakers and a good number of foreigners the biblical texts included with the CD release will be superfluous. Hyperion’s engineers step up with admirable clarity achieved on the choir’s home ground of Trinity College Chapel, and the result is a very satisfying Handel performance that contains nothing fancy but meshes beautifully with some of the more poetic passages in the Anglican liturgy.