Robert King / The King's Consort HANDEL Deborah

Handel was a prolifically ‘green’ composer who constantly recycled much of his best music. For Deborah he borrowed movements and themes from numerous compositions including the Brockes Passion, the Coronation Anthems, the Chandos Anthems, the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne and a number of early Italian works including Dixit Dominus. Many of these would have been new to London audiences. The scoring of Deborah was splendidly expansive, requiring an eight-part choir (all the more novel to eighteenth-century audiences who were used to operas with little ensemble work) and a large orchestral body of strings, oboes, bassoons, flutes, three horns, three trumpets, timpani, harpsichord and two organs. The scoring was unusually detailed, often providing ripieno lines for cellos and bassoons (rather than combining them all on the continuo line), and giving clear instructions for the disposition of keyboard instruments.

Reports from the first performance on 17 March 1733 state that among the hundred performers were ‘about twenty-five singers’. The three chorus singers that this figure allocated to each line would have made for a heavy evening’s singing (even with the soloists joining in the choruses), especially as no other oratorio except Samson gives the choir so much music to sing: such an imbalance in numbers between choir and orchestra would sound strange to our twentieth-century ears. In later performances Handel was able (as we are) to increase the scale and size of his choir. With this double choir, a large string section and six brass players the climaxes, scored in as many as twenty-four parts, are thrilling: to an eighteenth-century audience they must have been revelatory. Lady Irwin’s genteel ears, attuned to the single-voice arias of the opera, found it all a bit too much and wrote to her friend Lord Carlisle that she thought the choruses in Deborah to be ‘in music what I fancy a French ordinary in conversation’!

For the first run of Deborah Handel had an all-star cast. The title role was taken by Anna Strada (the only member of Handel’s former opera company who didn’t desert him later in the year to join the rival Opera of the Nobility), Barak was sung by the quarrelsome alto castrato Senesino, Abinoam by the famous bass Antonio Montagnana, Sisera by the contralto Francesca Bertolli (renowned both for her performances of male roles and for being courted later that year by the Prince of Wales), and Celeste Gismondi sang the roles of both Jael and the Israelite Woman. In July 1733 Handel repeated the work in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford (where he also presented the first performance of Athalia): the subsequent popularity of Deborah ensured that it was presented in another five oratorio series between 1734 and 1756. (Robert King)

'Deborah contains some of the most glorious music Handel ever wrote. Even if many of the numbers have been recycled from earlier works, the invention is still staggering. Handel devotees can thus amuse themselves spotting the tunes while everyone else can revel in the sumptuous scoring and the sheer vitality and humanity of the piece, all superbly conveyed in Robert King's recording'

(BBC Music Magazine Top 1000 CDs Guide)