Customer Reviews

Handel: Messiah

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This is a betwixt and between 'Messiah.' Harnoncourt is a good enough musician -- and strong minded enough -- to ignore period-style cliches. He doesn't double dot Handel's rhythms, which HIPsters turn into a fit of hiccups. He believes in religious feeling, compared to the antiseptic secularism that has become standard practice, especially from the English branch of the period clan. Thee's not even countertenor on the premises. The Concentus Musicum of Vienna was a pioneering ensemble in authentic Baroque style, yet Harnoncourt brings "Messiah" into a traditional expressive range; his remake in 2006 is almost neo-Romantic. Since "authenticity" is now a grab bag of stylistic quirks, with no two Messiahs resembling one another, this set's softer, gentler style deserves its place.

I have no quibble with the lack of vibrato in the strings; they are mellifluous and sweet-sounding. The Amazon reviewer is right about the soloists having foreign accents, but that's true on William Christie's excellent set, too. Christie is just as musically satisfying as Harnoncourt but with more of the conventional HIP speed and spareness. There's almost a sheen of cut velvet over this performance. My real complaint with Harnoncourt is his preference for reverent tempos that are at times slow even by the standards of Colin Davis, whose breakthrough recording on Philips form the Sixties opened many an eye (including Leonard Bernstein's -- he considered it a revelation). There's still spring in Harnoncourt's step, but a chorus like "He shall purify" seems to lose its sense of joy when taken at Harnoncourt's quirky solemn pace.

Overall, I prefer the remake, which is also betwixt and between but feels more "right" than this earlier set. In both a highly individual musician offers his own perspective, irrespective of any tradition, old or new. One has to go back to Hermann Scherchen in the Fifties to find anything this idiosyncratic. I'm glad such wild-card conductors exist.

This is Haendel's everlasting and unequaled masterpiece. He reaches in this work universality and maybe eternity. But first of all he is a man of his time : he tries to please everyone and not only one section of society. So his music does not sound overworked and overadorned. It sounds natural. We can follow every line as if we already knew it. We can expect every intervention of any instrument, or any break or transition in the music, just as if we had composed it. In other words Haendel is here a perfect post-Bach composer : he aims at pleasing everyone. He is also of his own time because of the use of a visual architecture to build his music. It is the architecture of those beautiful and flamboyant cathedrals we admire so much in England and elsewhere in Europe. We may think it is some kind of vain lace of stone and stained glass. But in fact every single little arch and detail is there to build a whole that would be completely meaningless if any one of those details were to be taken away. Haendel's music is exactly the same. There is not one single note too many, there is not one single adornment and variation too many. It is just perfect and we feel it to be perfect, we are convinced by our own senses that it is perfect because it survives our listening and lives in our minds forever. The feeling we get in that music is that many arches, be they voices or instruments, span the sky of our dreams with a complex network that stands up to our expectations and our pleasure, that stands on its own feet and conquers the densest and heaviest laws of gravity. We are constantly suspended in mid-air, in the pure immensity of the sky. But that has to do also with the meaning of the words and the language of the libretto. The language is pure elizabethan English, balanced and yet volatile, structured and yet evanescent, simple in appearance and yet using some fundamental structures and rhythms that the english language has put so deep in our unconscisouness that we feel enthusiastic about this inner life of the language without being able to point out why it is so exhilarating. We could demonstrate how it works. But what is important is that it regenerates what is universal in man's capture of the natural world around him : the cross of a binary well balanced rhythm (the famous iamb) and of a ternary ever turning rhythm. The cross of the two is perfectly contained and represented by the fundamental numerical symbol of six, two times three. This is the symbol of Salomon, the star of David. But this numerical structure is everywhere in the world, in any culture, and here Haendel uses that strength of the language of his libretto and amplifies it with the music giving it even more stability and pregnancy by squaring his use of it in many of his variations. But this leads to a last idea that explains why this work was a success in Dublin for its creation, and then a success in London even if eight years later. A success with the Irish and with the English, even if the English resisted it for some time. It is because he goes beyond the division of the world in good ones and bad ones. He reunifies humanity in absolute one-ness. And yet he justifies any struggle against oppressopn with some little sentences here and there that can yet be understood as the negation of the necessity of such struggles. In other words the ideological meaning of the work is ambiguous and it is this ambiguity that makes its universal success, along with its beauty : death is worth dying if we obey the Law because we will be redeemed, and death is also worth dying if we sin because Christ has redeemed us anyway and we will be made pure when the trumpet rings. In other words we are saved anyway, sinning or not sinning, fighting or not fighting. He retains both the example Jesus set to us (fight for purity, freedom, truth) and the redemption and salvation Jesus brought to us sinners even if we do not make the slightest effort to live according to the Law. We will all be redeemed. In other words we are divine both in our souls that abide by God's Law and in our flesh that was redeemed and saved by the sacrifice of Christ. This marvellous piece of music speaks to everyone and fits with any approach of life, and what's more it is simply and immediately and absolutely beautiful.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU