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Handel - Ode for St Cecilia’s Day
£14.26
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New Item
Label: Linn
Cat No: CKD578
Barcode: 0691062057820
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Vocal/Choral
Release Date: 5th October 2018
Butt’s tempos are daringly slow and his silences perfectly timed, bringing out the terse beauty of Handel’s vocal and instrumental lines. Bostridge bonds music to word-meaning so persuasively that they become a single heartfelt utterance, as in ‘The Trumpet’s Loud Clamour’. 
This is yet another Baroque tour de force from Butt, who has a simple knack of turning highly informed intelligence and curiosity into performances fired by spontaneous combustion.
The work packs a powerful punch in these hands, and nowhere more so than when Bostridge combines with the chorus in the aria hymning “the double, double, double beat/Of the thund'ring drum”.
A single, brilliant soprano declaims a chorale melody, alternating with full chorus, and is then joined by a solo trumpet to soar to the heavens: “The trumpet shall be heard on high/ The dead shall live, the living die/ And music shall untune the sky.” It’s one of the greatest moments in all of Handel, superbly realised by Carolyn Sampson and the Dunedin Consort under John Butt, working here with the Polish Radio Choir. Ian Bostridge adds his plangent imagination to Dryden’s vivid conjuring of music as the power that raises chaos into harmony, while Sampson’s “What passion cannot music raise and quell” is vividly touching. 
Soprano Carolyn Sampson and tenor Ian Bostridge are engaging soloists, Sampson sounding especially luminous. The Polish Radio Choir sings Dryden’s text with impressive clarity and the Dunedin Consort shines in the solo opportunities for cello, trumpet, flute and organ with which Handel hymns music’s sacred spheres.
Butt’s reading with the Dunedins and the Polish choir has irresistible sweetness, with the tenor Ian Bostridge and the soprano Carolyn Sampson on top form.
delectable music, delectably sung
