'Tis the season of Messiahs. MICHAEL DERVANsamples a few performances
Messiahs by: Our Lady's Choral Society, RTÉCO/Ó Duinn; Resurgam, IBO/Butt; NCC, ICO/Cohen
THE ENGLISH music historian Charles Burney summed up the success of Handel's Messiahrather well. The great work, he wrote, "has been heard in all parts of the kingdom with increasing reverence and delight; it has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan, and enriched succeeding managers of Oratorios, more than any single production in this or any country".
What was true in 1784 remains accurate in 2009, with Messiahcontinuing to raise funds for charity and to be a reliable money-spinner for choral societies. There was even a notorious attempt to commandeer its cachet for pop music with an updated MessiahXXI as part of the Millennium celebrations in Dublin in 1999. A year later, a guest columnist in these pages, Robin Hilliard, stirred up a hornets' nest by arguing for a moratorium on Messiah, so other pieces and composers could have "a look-in".
Performances of Messiahhave changed a lot over the years. The Dublin première in 1742 was a small-scale affair. Burney witnessed the advent of the massive approach to Messiahand the scale of the 1784 performances at Westminster Abbey was impressive by any standard, involving 500 performers, roughly half of them choral, the other half forming the orchestra. Performances focusing on grandeur, spaciousness and fervour persisted into the 20th century, and were still common a few decades ago, even though the numbers rarely matched earlier heights.
I went to three Dublin performances of Messiahover the last week, to see how different the various offerings can actually be.
The differences were huge. To put it at its simplest, nearly half-an-hour in duration, with different selections among possible musical numbers, and highly divergent approaches to ornamentation of vocal lines, with the biggest interventions coming from the soloists with the largest choir.
In terms of scale, this first (and shortest) performance – by Our Lady’s Choral Society with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under Proinnsías Ó Duinn at the National Concert Hall – involved nearly twice as many performers as the other two combined.
Our Lady’s Choral Society’s performance was the most secular of the three. The approach was founded on choral strength and energy, the words often delivered with, at one extreme, a kind of choppy vigour and, at the other, a withdrawn, veiled softness. The vitality, however, was just too relentless. The second half added the NCH organ to the mix and it was used for its power, turbo-charging the end of the work in ways that harked back to an earlier era.
The other two performances were promotions by the orchestras involved, rather than their professional choirs, which were hired for the night. The Irish Baroque Orchestra and the choir Resurgam fielded the smallest orchestra at Christ Church Cathedral , leaving out entirely the colours of oboes and bassoon, though retaining the essential contributions of trumpets and drums.
Resurgam are a fresh-voiced group with an agility and internal clarity that the larger forces of Our Lady’s simply could not be expected to match. Conductor John Butt secured that transparency which is one of the major achievements of the period-performance approach to this kind of repertoire. Choir and orchestra were kept in the kind of perspective which allowed everything to be heard, and his approach to Handelian line was refreshingly unhackneyed. Nothing was taken for granted, everything made sense and the airy articulation of the bass lines was a particular pleasure.
The Irish Chamber Orchestra working with the National Chamber Choir at the RDS tilted the balance of numbers in favour of the orchestra. But the choral singers proved the evening’s great strength, to the point where their musical agility and accuracy entirely outclassed any of the evening’s soloists.
Conductor Jonathan Cohen included pairs of oboes and bassoons in his line-up, with the bassoons often adding a lumbering weight to the bass lines, and the always neat-and-tidy orchestral playing sounding simply too four-square by comparison with the hyper-responsiveness of the IBO.
The biggest variable, however, both within and between performances, was found in the contribution of the vocal soloists. Robin Tritschler (with Our Lady’s) was the best of the tenors, communicative with the words, and persuasive in musical rhetoric.
The Polish bass Lukas Jacobski was an imposing rock of strength with the IBO, and the Japanese counter tenor Hiroya Aoki was both so near and so far with Our Lady's. His tone is gorgeous, even and easy, but doesn't quite adapt to the expressive moment as it needs to. Sadly, the sopranos didn't sound as if Messiahis a work in which they were entirely comfortable. All in all, it was the IBO with Resurgam who offered the most uplifting experience.
Oh, and by the way, the audiences at the NCH and the RDS followed the tradition of standing for the Hallelujahchorus. At Christ Church Cathedral people stayed in their seats.
