REVIEW – HANDEL and HAYDN CELEBRATION
The LANCASHIRE SINFONIETTA and THE MANCHESTER CHAMBER CHOIR

The Ashton Hall, Lancaster Town Hall

Saturday 24 October 2009 at 7pm.

This was another welcome local event to mark the bicentenary of the death of Austrian composer Franz Josef Haydn, and the 250th anniversary of the death of Georg Friedrich Handel, probably Britain’s best-loved composer.  It was particularly appropriate that the county’s own professional orchestra, the Lancashire Sinfonietta should bring three masterworks to the stately setting and delightful acoustics of the Ashton Hall.

Their intimate, chamber forces of around 30 players were well complemented by the admirable and able Manchester Chamber Choir, who fielded a similar number of mainly young singers.  Add five professional soloists from the world of opera, and you have the ideal recipe for tackling music from the eighteenth century.

The two choral pieces, Handel’s virtuosic psalm-setting, Dixit Dominus, was written when the composer was a mere 22, and Haydn’s tense and compelling Nelson Mass, were delivered with an enviable panache and expert attention to diction and dynamics.  Neither of these pieces is easy to perform, but both the Sinfonietta and the Manchester choir were more than up to the challenges.