Baroque Vocal Fireworks

Anyone who listens to Baroque music is familiar with the virtuoso lines often assigned to string sections, especially the violins, by the famous composers such as Vivaldi, Corelli, and Handel.  If you've ever experienced a Handel opera, you've encountered a similar style of flashy writing for this or that soloist. 

Today's piece is a work which hovers at the edge of the common repertoire -- well known to musicians, especially singers, but somewhat less familiar to the general musical public.  Familiar it certainly deserves to be!  If there's a hindrance to wider performance, it's the fact that the young Handel, in composing this work, sometimes seemed to forget that his singers were not in fact violins.

Handel composed his setting of Psalm 109, Dixit Dominus, in the year 1707 at the ripe old age of 22.  It is the first work of Handel's for which an authentic autograph score exists.  He wrote this music in Rome, where he had travelled to study and learn from the Italian musicians, the masters of the age. 

How well he learned their style can clearly be seen and heard in this virtuoso showpiece, which makes huge demands on soloists, choir, and the string orchestra with continuo.  In fact, Dixit Dominus is such a grand and spirited work that it came almost as a shock to me when I realized that there are no wind, brass or percussion parts in it.  The large scale of this psalm setting, in nine movements lasting about 35 minutes, makes it a major contribution to the Baroque choral repertoire.

The long opening movement is nothing less than a full-throttle, high-energy concerto grosso for voices and strings.  In it, you hear the rapid runs contrasted with a slower, stately cantus firmus set to the words "Donec ponam inimicus".  It's followed, by way of contrast, with two gentler solo arias.

The centre of the work is the energetic double fugue on "Tu es sacerdos" and "secundum ordinem Melchizedek" -- sung simultaneously to two quite different themes.  Following this comes the monumental triptych of the fast-running fugal "Dominus a dextris tuis", the slower "Judicabit in nationibus", and the vigorous hammerblows of "Conquassabit capita".

All of this energy is then discharged -- partially -- in the beautiful lyrical duet for two sopranos "De torrente in via bibet" with a murmured background from the male chorus.  But even this gentler, slower movement is hardly a point of relaxation, as the tension is maintained by the frequent clashing semitones between the two voices.

The final "Gloria patri et filio" matches the opening in scale, and even recalls the cantus firmus from the first movement, now set to the words "Sicut erat in principio" ("As it was in the beginning") -- Handel's joking way of reminding us where we've heard it before!  The final vigorous fugue on "Et in saecula saeculorum" maintains its speed and energy clear through to the finish line -- no slow majestic final cadence here!  Also, and unusually, it stays firmly in the minor key, a characteristic of so much of the work, right up to the concluding bar.

Like many of my age group, I cut my eyeteeth on David Willcocks' classic 1960s recording with the King's College Choir of Cambridge.  Revisiting it this week, in tribute to Willcocks' death after a long and prodigious career, I find it little short of astonishing to hear how nimbly the King's College boy trebles wrap their tongues and voices around such incredibly complex music!

I've heard several recordings since then, and of the more recent versions that have come to my notice the 2001 Philips recording conducted by John Eliot Gardiner is by far the best.  Since the arrival of "authentic practice" in Baroque music, Dixit Dominus has far too often been treated to the "anything you can sing, I can sing faster" mode of performance.  This, to me, is a huge mistake as the complex figurations of the vocal parts can easily blur into mush.  Gardiner strikes the ideal combination of pace and weight, and his Monteverdi Choir clearly enunciate each note in the endless melismatic runs.  This is, to me, the textbook example of how smaller ensembles can still communicate the weight and power of the music without sacrificing clarity and precision in the process.

On the classic Willcocks LP, this masterpiece stood alone.  Gardiner, in the CD age, has it as one part of a trio of major vocal works, alongside Vivaldi's magnificent Gloria in D major and the then-newly discovered Gloria by Handel, another Italianate virtuoso showpiece for solo soprano with strings and continuo.  It would be hard to find a more upbeat and exhilarating program of Baroque sacred music than this one!