When St George’s Church in Hanover Square opened in the 1720s, Handel lived just round the corner. He made St George’s his place of worship and his presence hovers still, making it the ideal home base for the London Handel Festival.
For this opening night celebration of the 2022 festival, musical director Laurence Cummings assembled a kind of greatest hits package, kicking off with Zadok the Priest. First heard at George II’s 1727 coronation, it has been a coronation fixture ever since. Familiarity has not bred contempt: even the most ardent republicans among us couldn’t help but be stirred by the sheer energy of this performance.
Cummings’s orchestra was the Academy of Ancient Music while choral duties were entrusted to singers from the National Youth Choir of Great Britain; glory be, players and singers actually seemed to be enjoying themselves. Leaving his podium, Cummings then took the solo part in Handel’s organ concerto known as The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. At first he opted for a stately tempo but things soon perked up; his treatment of the bird-call passages was drily witty, his embellishments concise rather than flashy.
Even with a fraction of the number of musicians Handel himself used, Music for the Royal Fireworks proved rather more explosive. There was a rare glimpse of a baroque contrabassoon, bubbling away malevolently while the horns and trumpets seemed intent on blowing the roof off. The second half opened with the premiere of Anna Clyne’s in thy beauty, its text drawn from another of Handel’s Coronation anthems. Proceeding at an even tempo, the piece managed to make baroque instruments sound contemporary, some bluesy slides working to entrancing effect. The vocal writing was idiomatic and expressive without becoming sentimental, the textual repetitions building cumulatively.
The mood turned darker when UK-based Ukrainian mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych took the stage. Wearing traditional Ukrainian headgear heavy with symbolism, which she described, she gave a short but impassioned speech, explaining that she was singing Dopo notte from Handel’s Ariodante, not as an operatic aria, but as a message of strength, hope and gratitude. It was a wonder she could sing it at all, let alone with such elan; quite rightly, she received a standing ovation. More royalist Handel followed: if The King shall rejoice and a rousing encore of Zadok the Priest didn’t bring the house down, it was a close thing.
This year the festival extends its reach, travelling to venues – Stone Nest in Soho, Village Underground in Shoreditch – better known for experimental performance than for baroquerie. Its recently appointed director, Gregory Batsleer, clearly hopes to expand the audience: Handel would no doubt be delighted that, in 2022, his music probably reaches more Londoners than it did in his lifetime.
