London Handel Choir and Orchestra/ Darlow/ Mackerras, St George's, Hanover Square, London

Augustan high camp in an enclosed space

A typical oblong, Wren-style design with wooden galleries and bright, if slightly boxy, acoustics, St George's, Hanover Square was Handel's own parish church in later years where the fervour of his worship was often observed. And since 1978, it has been the home of the annual London Handel Festival founded by Denys Darlow to explore lesser-known tracts of that vast output. Today, of course, Handel is everywhere, Darlow is now 80 and his organisation is facing serious financial deficit, but none of this dampened the spirit of the Queen's Jubilee Concert, with which the 25th Handel Festival has just ended.

Adrian Butterfield, the leader of the neat little period-instrument London Handel Orchestra, directed a pointed, volatile account of the Concerto Grosso in E minor, op 6 no 3, by way of an opener. Then Darlow launched The Choice of Hercules, a late cantata Handel partly rescued from his music for an abortive play by Smollett. This proved yet another of those Pleasure versus Virtue allegories, with especially seductive Handelian purlings to introduce the beguiling Emma Kirkby as Pleasure and martial trumpets backing the imperious Virtue of Julianne de Villiars, quite unphased by such unfortunate lines as "listen to my awful voice". In any case, after serious wobblings, the stripling Hercules, sung here by the promising counter tenor Clint van der Linde, duly does.

Kirkby also opened the second half with a short and spritely hunting cantata with trumpet obligato, Diana cacciatrice, from 1707, the young Handel's first year in Rome. Then Darlow made way for Sir Charles Mackerras, the president of the London Handel Society, to direct Handel's1739 setting of Dryden's celebrated paean A Song for St Cecilia's Day. Handel's setting? This is one of the more notorious instances of his "borrowing", with chunks of counterpoint culled from his contemporary Gottlieb Muffat and simply given the Handel touch – though that touch was indeed critical in transforming such lumpen material as the subject of the final fugue.

And who cares when the result proved such consumate Augustan high camp? Among its many pleasures were the eloquent cello obligato of Katharine Sharman to Kirkby's finely arched account of "What passion cannot music raise and quell" and the ever-clear diction and ease of tone of the ageless Ian Partridge in the tenor solos, plus the nuanced shadings and dancing rhythms Mackerras found everywhere in the score. No doubt the enthusiastic 14-member London Handel Choir would have sounded grander in a more spacious venue. But the sense of immediacy and involvement was palpable.