Portsmouth Baroque Choir Autumn Concert at St Paul's Chichester with the Consort of 12

Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s Autumn 2025 concert with the Consort of Twelve at St Paul’s Chichester on October 18th presents two exemplary and uplifting works written in Rome during
the first quarter of 18th-century: Handel’s Dixit Dominus (1707) and Alessandro Scarlatti’s St
Cecilia Mass (1721). Each one marks 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, from
the point of view of the tri-centenary year of his death, a late flourishing after a lifetime of prolific
creativity that provides a glimpse of future possibilities.

Details of Handel’s time in Italy are scant, but we know that in early 1707 the 22-year-old Handel,
a Lutheran, was commissioned to compose psalm settings for the Catholic liturgy, maybe for a
thanksgiving Vespers. These commissions resulted in one of Handel’s strongest and most
flamboyant works, Dixit Dominus
-
Psalm 110. The writing is virtuosic for 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 choral bandwidth, establishing a model for future Handelian thrillers like the Hallelujah chorus. This is the earliest of his works to be regularly performed.

While Dixit is a young man’s music, the St Cecilia Mass of 1720 is an end-of-career work yet
youthful in its sparkling solo passages and fast-paced choruses. Alessandro Scarlatti was 60
when he wrote it for Cardinal Acquaviva of Aragona, benefactor of the Sta Cecilia Basilica in
Rome, where the mass was first performed. It distils a lifetime of craft and experience. Less
spectacular than Handel’s Dixit it can be heard as paving the way for the style of mass writing that
would evolve through Mozart to Schubert.

Read more on the Portsmouth Baroque Choir website including a short sketch in the blog section
about Handel’s arrival in Rome and an imagined first run-through of Dixit Dominus.