Saturday 15 March 2025, 7.30pm

Chester Cathedral

Handel: Dixit Dominus
Vivaldi: Concerto for Two Trumpets
Bach: Magnificat

Chester Music Society Choir
Liverpool Sinfonia
Graham Jordan Ellis conductor

Tickets, priced at £30 (nave), £25 (West Steps) and £15 (side aisles).
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Handel's setting of Dixit Dominus is as dramatic as anything to be found in his operas or oratorios. Yet it is a very early work, written in April 1707 when he was barely 22 years old and had not long arrived in Rome. It seems likely that Handel intended this as part of a setting of the full Vespers service, for he also wrote settings of two other Vesper psalm texts.  Dixit Domius has rightly been called a virtuosic tour de force. It shows that Handel had thoroughly assimilated the highly charged, emotional style that characterized Italian music of the late Baroque.

Vivaldi composed the Concerto for Two Trumpets in C major possibly in the 1720s in Venice. It is his only trumpet concerto, written for the natural trumpet of the time; as a valveless instrument this was limited to the notes of the natural harmonic series which means that its music tends to stay close to its home key.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed this Magnificat for performance at Vespers on Christmas Day. It included three chorales plus a duet for soprano and bass, all particularly appropriate to the season. In about 1730 he revised the work, removing the four Christmas items, thus making it suitable for use at any festival. The liturgy for the Lutheran service was usually in German, but for special occasions, and in important churches, Latin was sometimes still used. So it was with the Magnificat, although it remained very much a product of Protestant Germany.