This recording on the AVIE label features Handel’s famous Dixit Dominus coupled with a rarely-performed setting of the same text by Alessandro Scarlatti.A. Scarlatti & Handel: Dixit Dominus. Both works date from early 18th century Rome, Handel’s within a year of his arriving in the musical capital, and possibly influenced by Scarlatti’s work, though the date of the elder Italian’s composition is not precisely known. Indeed it has been suggested that the 22-year-old Lutheran was attempting to outdo Scarlatti with his masterly grasp of large-scale sacred music for the Roman rite. In between these two grand Vespers, The Brook Street Band serve up a palette cleanser of an instrumental concerto in G minor by Scarlatti.

On this recording the massed forces are joined by five of Britain’s brightest young singers: soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, mezzo-sopranos Esther Brazil (a former Choral Scholar at Queen's) and Sally Bruce-Payne, tenor Guy Cutting, and bass-baritone Matthew Brook.

Track List

01.–08. Dixit Dominus (Alessandro Scarlatti)
09.–11. Concerto No. 4 in G minor (Alessandro Scarlatti)
12.–19. Dixit Dominus, HWV 232 (George Frideric Handel)

Reviews

★★★★★ Performances of the highest quality, with the Queen’s choir at its best Choir and Organ