Handel: Dettingen Te Deum

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Music reviews of Handel: Dettingen Te Deum

Music Review: MUSIC'S OWN MICHELANGELO
Rating: 5 Stars

A good many years ago a French performance with English soloists helped restore the Te Deum to the repertory after doing the necessary research into Handel's real intentions and restoring a proper balance between chorus and soloists to what had been presented previously as a lumbering and monotonous effort consisting almost entirely of chorus, and in consequence very understandably ignored. The performance was not particularly successful, and very dully recorded into the bargain, but it laid the groundwork for later interpreters more at home with the style. Listening to this absolutely superlative account from Preston and his Westminster Abbey performers I still feel a sense of gratitude to its predecessor for making me familiar with the work in the first place. There still seems to be a minor area of doubt regarding the precise nature of the some of the solos - the French version from Grimbert has two sopranos, Preston has a male alto but no women soloists and whether for that reason or simply through a better stylistic grasp the effect here is much preferable.

It is not really very long ago that a fatuous sport consisting of tracing alleged borrowings by Handel was played out on Israel in Egypt and this Te Deum as favourite turfs. It was great fun in its silly way. This work was charged as having been largely borrowed from a Te Deum by one Urio, and a counter-charge by Handel's loyal if uninformed champions maintained that Urio was a place not a person and that Handel was himself the author of the Urio Te Deum. Tovey was not especially well versed in the issue but he said the most sensible thing in many years when he remarked simply that the phrases being battled over were tags that anyone at all might have written and that trying to draw any conclusions from them out of context was completely pointless and futile. Tovey rightly drew attention to the magnificence of the start, and his vivid phrase came back to me as I heard that on this disc, where `the orchestra...batters out a sledgehammer tattoo on the tonic and dominant'. In the sheer power of making a musical statement, in the sheer sense of how to put words to music, in his instinct for timing and in his feeling for choral tone Handel at his greatest has an uncomfortable way of making every other composer seem almost an amateur. The great opening proclamations with their long pauses marked out by a ticking beat on the violins, and the intonations of `Holy, holy, holy' which the cherubim and seraphim continually do cry `continually, continually, continually, continually...', things like this were never borrowed from Urio or from anyone.

The performance seems to me completely outstanding in its professionalism, instinct for the idiom of the time and the idiom of this composer in particular. The recording matches it, as you will appreciate straightaway in the opening phrases. As a makeweight I am very pleased also to have the Dettingen anthem, not a masterpiece comparable with its great companion, but something that if I had been George II I would have thought myself lucky enough to have received as a tribute just on its own.

Description of Handel: Dettingen Te Deum

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