You should catch Carolyn Sampson, Ian Bostridge and the Dunedin in this Handel masterpiece. They glide through the score in utterly ravishing ways that transcend rival recordings…Butt’s tempos are daringly slow and his silences perfectly timed, bringing out the terse beauty of Handel’s vocal and instrumental lines. Bostridge bonds music to word-meaning so persuasively that they become a single heartfelt utterance.

Fabulously expressive word-painting from stellar soloists, including some very Italian English from Ian Bostridge, meets playing of the most vivacious sprightliness, richly-toned, high-octane singing from combined UK and Polish forces, and great clarity, immediacy and warmth of recorded sound in this outstanding release...a lovelier, more joyful performance seems unimaginable.

[Butt] treads a satisfying path between the detailed, dance-based style of early period-instrument performers like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the more vigorous manner of Charles Mackerras or John Eliot Gardiner. Everything is at once graceful and uplifting.

In the 15 years since she recorded the Ode with King, Carolyn Sampson’s vernal soprano has acquired richer shadings…her poised, invariably graceful contributions are among the disc’s prime pleasures…Bostridge, in fine, robust voice, never lets you forget that something urgent is at stake…Under Butt’s lively and sympathetic direction (which includes properly shaped bass lines), both framing choruses generate an apt Handelian majesty.

Augmented by the Polish Radio Choir, this full-blooded reading of Handel’s great hymn to the patron saint of music plays out on a larger scale than we’re perhaps used to from Butt and his Dunedin forces, to powerful and frequently moving effect: there’s a sardonic glint behind Bostridge’s apparent paeon to the bellicose effects of martial music, whilst Sampson provides balm with a beautifully fluid account of ‘What passion cannot music raise and quell!’.

Butt’s reading with the Dunedins and the Polish choir has irresistible sweetness, with the tenor Ian Bostridge and the soprano Carolyn Sampson on top form.

Ian Bostridge adds his plangent imagination to Dryden’s vivid conjuring of music as the power that raises chaos into harmony, while Sampson’s “What passion cannot music raise and quell” is vividly touching.

The work packs a powerful punch in these hands, and nowhere more so than when Bostridge combines with the chorus in the aria hymning “the double, double, double beat/Of the thund’ring drum”.