Intret in conspectu tuo, an extraordinary motet by the seventeenth-century Venetian composer Giovanni Legrenzi, would not be known to us save for a copy made by Handel in about 1750. Some years earlier, Handel had reworked the opening theme of this motet within the chorus ‘O first created beam’ in his oratorio Samson, a theme made striking by its descent through the unorthodox interval of a diminished third, which in Legrenzi’s original expresses the anguish of the word ‘gemitus’, ‘groaning’. It is the only six-voice motet we possess by Legrenzi, unique within his output in both its style and its structure, and an isolated remnant of a lost repertory of such six-voice motets from St Mark’s, Venice, where Legrenzi was maestro di cappella, third in succession to Monteverdi, who was the most distinguished holder of that post in the seventeenth century. Legrenzi wrote Intret in conspectu tuo for celebrations in January 1687 marking Venetian victories over the Ottomans. The composite text made up of passages from the Psalms expresses in turn the laments of a people suffering foreign invasion, their prayers to God to intervene and to take up arms on their behalf, and the resulting victory celebration. In response, Legrenzi created an intensely dramatic musical narrative, moving from the sombre grandeur of the opening movement—in imposing six-voice counterpoint of a time-hallowed kind—via the ardent echoing exhortations of a trio of sopranos (‘surge, surge’) and the plaintive harmonies of a lower-voice trio, to the incandescent declamation of the scenes of battle by the full ensemble.

from notes by Owen Rees © 2024