Blessed Cecilia celebrated in style by Gabrieli Consort & Players

After Friday’s sublime performance of Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato at the opening concert of 2013 Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music, I am puzzled why this ravishing masterpiece doesn’t enjoy wider popularity (although it was performed recently at the London Handel Festival).

It’s a long way from modern Durham to renaissance Venice, from a cold winter evening in a small northern English city to a spring morning in one of the richest and most powerful cities the world has ever seen – but Paul McCreesh’s imaginative reconstruction of a Venetian Doge’s coronation mass made the leap almost instantaneous.

Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, first performed at the Birmingham Town Hall in 1847, was enormously popular in Victorian England. In this sense, the Royal Albert Hall, the grandest of Victorian buildings, is spiritually an ideal venue for this great choral masterpiece.

Leider litt die rekonstruierte Weihnachtsmesse der Gabrieli Players an ein paar „Aufführungskrankheiten“.