Vivaldi - Gloria · Handel - Gloria · Dixit Dominus / English Baroque Soloists · Monteverdi Choir · Gardiner
The Gloria in excelsis Deo, recently announced as a newly discovered work by Handel, has actually been known to scholars for many years. Nobody paid it much attention until Professor Hans Joachim Marx of Hamburg University certified the piece as authentic while editing Handel's Latin church music for the ongoing Halle edition of the composer's works. Is it the genuine article? Anthony Hicks, in the excellent booklet notes, seems more judicious than some in his assessment. If it is Handel's, which he considers likely, then it may well belong to his teenage years in Halle, from which almost nothing survives save a Laudate pueri setting. Whatever its provenance, this is a most attractive little work, full of rewards for both performers and listeners.John Eliot Gardiner's interpretation, with Gillian Keith as soloist, has persuaded me of what I wasn't sure on hearing the first recording of the Gloria, that this is indeed authentic Handel. The brilliant acoustic, putting a burnish on the playing of the English Baroque Soloists, together with Keith's assured and sensitive handling of the vocal line throughout, enhances that sense of grand design – can we call it anything so prosaic as 'forward planning'? – at the heart of Handel's best works. It's much easier, too, on this version, to play the association game, with echoes from other pieces in the established canon – a cadence here, an incipit there, a phrase anticipating the Chandos Anthems, the Utrecht Te Deum or even the first English oratorios. Keith is as finely attuned as Gardiner to the interplay of exuberance and pensiveness here, Handel's 'allegro and penseroso' as it were, before he'd even read Milton's poems.This is a heart-stirring performance, which leads naturally to the Dixit Dominus, one of Handel's most demanding vocal works and in essence a tribute, when he'd barely got there, to what the travel brochures call 'the magic of Italy'. The piece, which may have been part of the so-called 'Carmelite Vespers' for which Handel is known to have furnished other compositions, is a stunning mixture of musical learning, homage to earlier styles, practical risk-taking and bold, dramatic effect. Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir do this sort of thing as easily as falling off a log. I'm never quite persuaded that the conductor sees Handel as much more than an inspired circus artist, pulling musical rabbits out of hats and doing operatic triple somersaults, but his approach is unfailingly attention-grabbing and makes us listen to the notes as well as the performers. Solos here are expertly taken by individual choir members and the instrumental sound has a grain and muscle to it which are ideally suited to the restless surge of Handel's invention.The disc begins with what will always be the most popular of Vivaldi's choral works, the Gloria, RV589, probably composed for a thanksgiving Mass for victories over the Turks. There's a fine swashbuckling quality to this performance, but Gardiner manages to avoid making Vivaldi's idiosyncratic musical language seem vulgar or naïve, unearthing the complexities beneath the apparent simplicity and directness of engagement. The pulse of individual movements is beautifully caught, especially in the bouncing 'Laudamus te' and the affecting dialogue of the 'Domine Deus'. Once again the acoustic is lavish, indeed thoroughly Baroque. The disc as a whole offers an excellent illustration of what that much-discussed word actually means in musical terms.Jonathan B. Keates--From International Record Review - subscribe now