Praise The Lord – Handel/Hopson
Hal Hopson (b. 1933) has been a prolific producer of all manner of sacred music over the previous few decades, including vocal solos, choral anthems, organ music, and larger works such as cantatas. His works are asserted to number in the thousands; our library at ESUMC includes 46 Hopson works for children, youth, and adult choirs as well as handbells and other instrumentals.
In Praise the Lord (1974 – listen), Hopson has extracted the best parts of two movements (Hail Judea, Happy Land duet, then chorus) of the Handel oratorio Judas Maccabeas (1746) and melded them into a lively two-minute anthem. This is a fine bit of engineering! While the text has the feeling of a Psalm in the high nineties, it is in fact Hopson’s invention and seems to emerge spontaneously from the spirit of Handel’s music.
George Frideric Handel (1685-1769) based Judas Maccabeas on the Jewish revolt from the Seleucid Empire in the second century BC as recounted in the deuterocanonical book 1 Maccabees. In addition to Praise the Lord, Judas Maccabeas is also the source of the hymn tune Judas Maccabeas heard in Thine Be the Glory each Easter. The tune is taken from movement 56: See the Conqu’ring Hero Comes. You can hear Robert Redford and Michael Kitchen sing the last line of See the Conqu’ring Hero Comes in the film Out of Africa (1985).
__
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Hopson
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Maccabaeus_(Handel)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frideric_Handel
