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Nobody could do Royal celebrations quite like Handel: witness his perennially popular
Water Music and
Fireworks Music. Beating the French was always a good excuse for a musical knees-up, so after the battle of Dettingen in 1743, in which British and Hanoverian troops under the leadership of George II no less, trounced them once again, Handel was quick to catch the nation's celebratory mood with a joyful English-language setting of the
Te Deum ("We praise thee, O Lord"). It's an exuberant work in the tradition of his large-scale oratorios (
The Messiah had been premiered just two years earlier) given a suitably boisterous rendition here by the Swiss Radio choir, soloists and period-instrument group, Ensemble Vanitas. The reverberant live recording in the Church of San Sempliciano, Milan isn't kind to either the soloists' or choir's English diction, but the overall tenor of the performance makes up in energy what it lacks in such detail. The
Dixit Dominus is a smaller-scale work, written much earlier in Handel's life during his stay in Rome in 1707 when the young composer was still absorbing the Italianate style of Scarlatti and Corelli. Again, this is a live recording, but the acoustic of Lugano Cathedral suits the music well, as is only to be expected for a professedly sacred work (the victorious boasting of the
Te Deum is unashamedly secular, despite the text). It's a fine coupling, and if the performances aren't especially subtle, neither is the music. --
Mark Walker