As Mel Brooks once put it, “it’s good to be the king.”  If you were a British royal in the 18th century, it meant having the cosmopolitan and talented George Frederic Handel at your disposal, conjuring regal music to celebrate all the important milestones in your life.  Hand-picked from over 40 years that Handel spent in London, Jane Glover’s Music of the Baroque performed three of his pieces at the Harris Theater that collectively traced the arc of a royal life, from divinely-inspired birth through marriage and death.

The Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne opened with remarkable long-note descending strings under mezzo-soprano recitative and trumpet solo, elemental tone-painting that dramatically depicted the rising of the sun.  Handel’s flair for theatrics was on full display, and the ensemble relished in the evocative music.  The rest of the nine-movement piece was a mostly joyous celebration of Queen Anne’s birth, featuring the spot-on continuously fluttering melismas of soprano Christine Brandes and mezzo Phyllis Pancella.

The celebratory Wedding Anthem for Prince Frederick of Wales and Princess Augusta of Saze-Gotha was typically Handelian, filled with joy, exuberance and counterpoint.  The upper strings, one of the highlights of any Music of the Baroque concert, were characteristically on the exact same interpretive page, and far overshadowed an out-of-tune and too-tense cello solo on “Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine.”  This work also featured the sleeper hit of the evening, tenor Nicholas Phan, whose huge, hall-filling voice attacked streams of sixteenth notes with youthful exuberance and helped to bring the work to a triumphant close.

With the precision of a master artist, Glover painted a picture of grief, loss, and remembrance on an aural canvas with the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, music that brought Handel’s intimate relationship with the royal family to the forefront.  Opening with funereal music that had a touch of bittersweet recollection and occasionally otherworldly stillness, the work turned a corner with the choral “When the ear heard her, then it blessed her,” and most of the rest of the work was an optimistic but solemn reflection on the beauty of life.  If the first work on the program began with sunrise, then the final movement to this work was a touching sunset, displaying Handel’s ability to convey the entire range of human emotion through music.