Handel: Song for St Cecilia’s Day, Look Down Harmonious Saint, Concerto Grosso - Ludus Baroque, Richard Neville-Towle, Mary Bevan, Ed Lyon

Following the widespread critical acclaim of their debut recording, 'Alexander’s Feast', Ludus Baroque brings their celebrated verve to Handel's 'Song for St Cecilia’s Day'. Coupled with his miniature cantata for tenor, 'Look down Harmonius Saint', which Handel wrote to supplement performances of 'Alexander's Feast', and with the Concerto Grosso in B flat, written in his fruitful autumn of 1739, Handel approaches the setting of this second text by John Dryden with the same extraordinary vividness of detail and metrical virtuosity as Alexander’s Feast.

"What passion cannot music raise and quell?" - the answer is that it can raise and quell them all: martial, erotic, sacred … but as music had, in the beginning, been the divine principle of cosmic order, so, on the Final Day, it will be the force that dissolves the universe.