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 ...
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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...
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