Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti at St Paul's Church, Chichester on Saturday 18th October 2025

Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti

Add to my Calendar 18-10-2025 19:00 18-10-2025 21:00 36 Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s Autumn 2025 concert with the Consort of Twelve at St Paul’s Chichester presents two ground-breaking masterpieces written in Rome during the first quarter of 18th-century: Handel’s Dixit Dominus (1707) and Alessandro Scarlatti’s St Cecilia Mass (1721).  Handel and Scarlatti certainly knew and admired each other’s work and are likely to have met in Venice or Naples but not in Rome. Scarlatti left Rome for Venice during 1706 to avoid the papal ban on opera. Handel, aged 21, arrived from Hamburg via Florence at the end of 1706 and rapidly became connected with the city’s aristocracy and clergy who were renowned for their generous support of the arts. His time in Italy remains a mystery, but we know that in early 1707 the Lutheran Handel was commissioned, either by Cardinal Colonna or by Cardinal Ottoboni, to compose psalm settings for the Catholic liturgy, maybe for a thanksgiving Vespers on July 16th at the Church of Santa Maria in Montesanto. These commissions resulted in one of Handel’s strongest and most flamboyant sacred works, Dixit Dominus. Nowadays, this text (Psalm 110) can appear bellicose but in earlier times its association with coronations and the ordination of priests made it one of the most frequently referenced of all the Psalms. For Handel it was especially significant because Luther had singled it out as the pre-eminent text about Christ’s coming, judge of nations. A Roman audience at that time would have understood the text as prophecising Christ’s victory over earthly enemies and devilish works, including the many natural disasters and hostilities that afflicted their lives. Handel calls for virtuosity in players and singers alike as key words from this messianic psalm are singled out and turned into torrents of melody or hammered out in music of unprecedented drama and bandwidth. In Dixit Dominus Handel successfully combines the best of German contrapuntal writing with Corellian figuration and fashionable, operatic drama, establishing a model for future Handelian thrillers like the Hallelujah chorus, Zadok the Priest and Semele. The inclusion of cantus firmus melodies that evoke medieval plainchant within the textures of Dixit provides a timeless dimension. This is the earliest of his works to be regularly performed, much admired and respected by choirs brave enough to tackle its demands. While Dixit is a young man’s music, honouring the styles of his elders, the St Cecilia Mass of 1720 is an end-of-career work, its fast, virtuosic choruses and sparkling solo passages acknowledging the passionate fluency of the junior Handel’s work. Alessandro Scarlatti was 60 when he wrote it for Cardinal Francesco Acquaviva of Aragona, an important supporter of Philip V’s cause in War of Spanish Succession and benefactor of the Sta Cecilia Basilica in Trastevere, Rome, where the mass was first performed. It distils a lifetime of craft and experience. Scarlatti, born in Sicily, had been sent to Rome as a 12-year old but his main base was Naples where he founded the opera house and wrote for it copiously - 120 operas must count as a record. It seems Neapolitan audiences grew weary of his music and his later operatic successes, such as Telemaco, were all performed in Rome. The St Cecilia Mass is less spectacular than Handel’s Dixit, or Vivaldi’s Gloria, written five years earlier, but it can be heard as paving the way for the style of mass writing that would evolve through Bach and Mozart to Beethoven and Schubert. Dixit Dominus and the St Cecilia Mass: two exemplary and uplifting sacred works from three centuries ago that mark a gathering point in their respective composer’s careers: in Handel’s case the culmination of a decade of study and extraordinary promise; for Scarlatti a late glimpse of future possibilities after a lifetime of prolific, musical creativity. St Paul's Church, Chichester DD/MM/YYYY

Details

St Paul's Church
Churchside
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 6FT
England

Saturday 18th October 2025
7:00 PM

Tickets

Prices: £18 (£20 on the door) £5 student/U18
Book Tickets

Programme

Alessandro Scarlatti – St Cecilia Mass (1720)
~ Interval ~
George Frideric Handel – Dixit Dominus, HWV 232

Performers

Malcolm Keeler – Conductor

The Consort of Twelve
Portsmouth Baroque Choir

Programme Note

Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s Autumn 2025 concert with the Consort of Twelve at St Paul’s Chichester presents two ground-breaking masterpieces written in Rome during the first quarter of 18th-century: Handel’s Dixit Dominus (1707) and Alessandro Scarlatti’s St Cecilia Mass (1721).

Handel and Scarlatti certainly knew and admired each other’s work and are likely to have met in Venice or Naples but not in Rome. Scarlatti left Rome for Venice during 1706 to avoid the papal ban on opera. Handel, aged 21, arrived from Hamburg via Florence at the end of 1706 and rapidly became connected with the city’s aristocracy and clergy who were renowned for their generous support of the arts. His time in Italy remains a mystery, but we know that in early 1707 the Lutheran Handel was commissioned, either by Cardinal Colonna or by Cardinal Ottoboni, to compose psalm settings for the Catholic liturgy, maybe for a thanksgiving Vespers on July 16th at the Church of Santa Maria in Montesanto. These commissions resulted in one of Handel’s strongest and most flamboyant sacred works, Dixit Dominus. Nowadays, this text (Psalm 110) can appear bellicose but in earlier times its association with coronations and the ordination of priests made it one of the most frequently referenced of all the Psalms. For Handel it was especially significant because Luther had singled it out as the pre-eminent text about Christ’s coming, judge of nations. A Roman audience at that time would have understood the text as prophecising Christ’s victory over earthly enemies and devilish works, including the many natural disasters and hostilities that afflicted their lives.

Handel calls for virtuosity in players and singers alike as key words from this messianic psalm are singled out and turned into torrents of melody or hammered out in music of unprecedented drama and bandwidth. In Dixit Dominus Handel successfully combines the best of German contrapuntal writing with Corellian figuration and fashionable, operatic drama, establishing a model for future Handelian thrillers like the Hallelujah chorus, Zadok the Priest and Semele. The inclusion of cantus firmus melodies that evoke medieval plainchant within the textures of Dixit provides a timeless dimension. This is the earliest of his works to be regularly performed, much admired and respected by choirs brave enough to tackle its demands.

While Dixit is a young man’s music, honouring the styles of his elders, the St Cecilia Mass of 1720 is an end-of-career work, its fast, virtuosic choruses and sparkling solo passages acknowledging the passionate fluency of the junior Handel’s work. Alessandro Scarlatti was 60 when he wrote it for Cardinal Francesco Acquaviva of Aragona, an important supporter of Philip V’s cause in War of Spanish Succession and benefactor of the Sta Cecilia Basilica in Trastevere, Rome, where the mass was first performed. It distils a lifetime of craft and experience. Scarlatti, born in Sicily, had been sent to Rome as a 12-year old but his main base was Naples where he founded the opera house and wrote for it copiously - 120 operas must count as a record. It seems Neapolitan audiences grew weary of his music and his later operatic successes, such as Telemaco, were all performed in Rome. The St Cecilia Mass is less spectacular than Handel’s Dixit, or Vivaldi’s Gloria, written five years earlier, but it can be heard as paving the way for the style of mass writing that would evolve through Bach and Mozart to Beethoven and Schubert.

Dixit Dominus and the St Cecilia Mass: two exemplary and uplifting sacred works from three centuries ago that mark a gathering point in their respective composer’s careers: in Handel’s case the culmination of a decade of study and extraordinary promise; for Scarlatti a late glimpse of future possibilities after a lifetime of prolific, musical creativity.

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