Handel: Coronation Anthems / Silete Venti

Description

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)Coronation Anthems • Silete VentiMaurice Greene was appointed organist and composer to the English Chapel Royal on 4th September 1727, just as preparations for the coronation of King George II were beginning in earnest. Five days later, however, it was announced that the recently naturalised German-born composer George Frideric Handel had already been commissioned by the monarch-in-waiting to write the new music for the coronation service. A further week and a half later the running order of the coronation service was finalised: this gave Handel precisely two weeks in which to bring his four new anthems to performance (we must assume that he had already done a significant amount of work on them by this stage). As things turned out, the coronation was postponed by a week because of the danger of the River Thames bursting its banks at Westminster. Eventually, however, on the wet morning of 11th October, George II was crowned to the accompaniment of Handel’s four new anthems and other music stretching back over a century and a half by Purcell, Blow, Child, Gibbons, Farmer, and Tallis. One of the musical mysteries surrounding the coronation of King George II is how the choir ever made itself heard above the sound of the orchestra. Handel specified 47 singers (exactly, as it happens, the number used on this recording) yet an article in the Norwich Gazette of 14th October 1727 stated that there were four times the number of instrumentalists as singers (on this recording there are half as many). Maybe this was why William Wake, the Archbishop of Canterbury, described the performance of The King shall rejoice as "the anthem all in confusion: all irregular in the music". The actual order of the coronation service is a matter of some speculation although it seems likely that the first of Handel’s anthems to be performed was The King shall rejoice, the very subject of Archbishop William’s criticism. Handel assembled the text for this anthem from Psalm XXI as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer. Strings and oboes are soon joined by trumpets and drums in preparation for the choir’s jubilant entry. As so often with Handel the word painting is simple but effective: the word ‘rejoice’ is set expansively and melismatically while the words ‘in thy strength, O Lord’ are set solidly and homophonically. There follows a lilting triple-time movement which shows the king to be ‘exceeding glad’ in a contented and reserved manner rather than in the ebullient manner of the opening movement. The choicest music is saved for the words ‘of thy salvation’ where Handel uses chains of suspensions to lend a rather archaic, ecclesiastical air to the proceedings. The contrapuntal third movement is introduced by a blaze of glory and thereafter the movement reflects on ‘the blessings of goodness’. Such goodness is ultimately rewarded by the appearance of a golden crow