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GRAMOPHONE (08/2016)
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Reviewer: David Vickers

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s scribbles on his order of service reveal that the music did not go smoothly during the coronation of George II and Queen Caroline at Westminster Abbey on October 11, 1727. Happily, the success of Handel’s four anthems for the occasion directly influenced the choral elements in his first public oratorios a few years later. For example, My heart is inditing and Zadok the Priest – with the parody text ‘God is our hope and our strength’ – were both incorporated into the expanded version of Esther performed during the 1731‑32 opera season. Therefore it is an interesting idea for Accent to issue the Göttingen Handel Festival’s NDR broadcasts of all four coronation anthems (recorded in 2014) alongside a selection of five choruses from the 1732 version of Esther (taken from a performance of the oratorio by almost identical personnel two years earlier).

As it happens, the majority of the music chosen from the oratorio is from the original Cannons version (c1720), but the disc concludes with the aforementioned ‘God is our hope’ (attentive listeners will spot that for the oratorio version Handel removed the section ‘and all the people rejoiced and said’). Laurence Cummings’s assured shaping of the excellent orchestra and the NDR Chorus’s strong yet balanced textures are particularly satisfying in the largest-scale brassiest passages of the Coronation Anthems. Whether in the suspenseful theatricality of the opening of Zadok the Priest or the regal splendour of the ‘Alleluja’ fugue that concludes The king shall rejoice, often these resonant live performances are globally on a par with the best studio versions in the sizeable catalogue. The Hamburg-based choir misses the mark slightly for the feminine middle sections designed to illustrate the attributes of Queen Caroline in My heart is inditing, but the doleful ‘Ye sons of Israel mourn’ from Esther shows that this Teutonic choir can sing Handel in English with as much eloquence as any native British choir.

 

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