{TABLE} Elijah .............. Mendelssohn {/TABLE} MENDELSSOHN'S oratorio Elijah had its premiere 150 years ago at the Birmingham Festival. Rehearsals were held in London and the entire team of performers 125 orchestral players and a chorus of 271 travelled by special train to Birmingham for what proved to be one of the greatest triumphs of the composer's career.
Mendelssohn was the favourite composer of Victorian England and, Elah came to rival Handel's Messiah in popularity. How the times have changed can be gauged by a look into the current CD catalogue, which lists 36 complete recordings of Messiah but lust five of Elijah, all of them, incidentally, sung in the original German rather than the composer approved English version which has retained currency in Ireland.
Our Lady's Choral Society's 150th anniversary performance at the National Concert Hall on Sunday was more sturdy than imaginative. The choir rose to the heaviest demands with enthusiasm, the women sang with fresh, open tone, the outnumbered men battled bravely. But there was not much in the way of variegated response to music or words. The chorus of angels, Lift thine eyes, sung by the Lindsay singers elevated the music making onto an altogether higher plane and served as a reminder of what was missing elsewhere in this performance.
As in the 1846 premiere, the soprano was the weakest of the soloists, with Joan Merrigan demonstrating insecurities of pitching which I found seriously unsettling. The contralto Deirdre Cooling Nolan was at her best in quieter passages (particularly her arioso, Woe unto them), tenor Ronan Tynan sang with directness and ease (and, appropriately, without most of the Italianate mannerisms which have been such a feature of his style in the past), and bass Ian Caddy was reliably forth right.
In Proinnsias O Duinn's no nonsense reading, the National Sinfonia sounded decidedly scrappy in the overture and mostly workmanlike else where a welcome exception was the imaginatively scored 55 for lower strings and wind accompanying Elijah's When the heavens are closed up.
