Recorded in Rome - the very place for which this work was composed - this album aims to produce a plausible reconstruction of the office of Vespers celebrated by the Carmelite Order at the Santa Maria di Monte Santo church, when a young Handel was working there around the year 1707.
Leading the Musica Antiqua Latina ensemble and the Coro da Camera Italiano, Giordano Antonelli unveils an office punctuated with psalms by various Italian composers surrounding Handel’s Dixit Dominus, as well as numerous Gregorian sequences alternating with contemporary music by Giovanni Paolo Colonna, Antonio Maria Bononcini, Alessandro Scarlatti and instrumental pieces by Corelli and Frescobaldi.
This rendering reveals a devoutness which is theatrical and virtuosic in equal parts, recreating as accurately as possible the music that would have been heard in the papal city at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with voluptuous vocal and instrumental pieces mirroring the tormented forms of Baroque art and the omnipresence of angels and demons flying around all the Roman churches. © François Hudry/Qobuz