Dunedin Consort - Handel: Ode for St Cecilia's Day - The Observer

“So when the last and dreadful hour/ This crumbling pageant shall devour…” John Dryden’s apocalyptic vision of the last judgement seems uncannily relevant to present discontents: few would choose to set it to music with the stark, fierce beauty imagined by Handel at the end of his 1739 Ode for St Cecilia’s Day (Linn). A single, brilliant soprano declaims a chorale melody, alternating with full chorus, and is then joined by a solo trumpet to soar to the heavens: “The trumpet shall be heard on high/ The dead shall live, the living die/ And music shall untune the sky.” It’s one of the greatest moments in all of Handel, superbly realised by Carolyn Sampson and the Dunedin Consort under John Butt, working here with the Polish Radio Choir. Ian Bostridge adds his plangent imagination to Dryden’s vivid conjuring of music as the power that raises chaos into harmony, while Sampson’s “What passion cannot music raise and quell” is vividly touching.