Avie AV 2274

Handel and Scarlatti: Dixit Dominus – Elin Manahan Thomas, Esther Brazil, Sally Bruce-Payne, Guy Cutting, Matthew Brook, Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford, Owen Rees (director), The Brook Street Band

Following five critically acclaimed and immensely popular recordings for Avie, The Brook Street Band embarks on its most ambitious project to date: a recording with the estimable student Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford that pairs for the first time ever the two settings of Dixit Dominus by Alessandro Scarlatti and George Frideric Handel. Both works were written in Rome in the early eighteenth century. Handel composed his within a year of arriving in the musical capital, possibly influenced by the setting by Scarlatti, though the date of the elder Italian’s work is not precisely known. Indeed it has been suggested that the twenty-two-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 serves up a palate cleanser in the form 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: the soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, mezzo-sopranos Esther Brazil and Sally Bruce-Payne, tenor Guy Cutting, and bass-baritone Matthew Brook.