A Chorus of Hallelujahs

Regular readers of Free Composition are aware that I have recently begun researching a long article on Handel’s Messiah. (It’s for the Philharmonia Baroque’s December concerts, by the way.) If you need a quick review, here it is. Part of writing a program note, for me at any rate, is to listen to the work in question repeatedly, listen to it until it has penetrated to the mitochondrial level, listen to it until it goes squirting out my ears if I move my head too quickly, listen to it until I begin dreaming about it.

Regular readers are no doubt aware that I’m an enthusiastic record collector. If you require evidence, you will find some here and here and here and here.

Regular readers are also no doubt aware that I absolutely love to write. Here’s a recent article about that.

Put it together. Result: an article about Messiah recordings.

Given that Messiah is a long piece, I’m not about to subject myself, or anybody else, to a blow-by-blow description of recordings in their entirety, perhaps singling out a particularly felicitous He shall feed his flock from one or subjecting another’s Glory to God to riotous abuse. Oh, no: the thing here is to take one single movement from the work and trace it through the eight recordings in my current collection.

Which means the Hallelujah Chorus. Oh, I suppose I could be more scholarly about it all, concentrate on How beautiful are the feet, for example, given its multiplicity of versions. But I wanted to do the Hallelujah. Besides, it’s mid-day and the neighbors are all at work, and Fasolt & Fafner—the twin B&W 803D speakers in the living room—haven’t had a good solid romp in at least a week or so. F&F just love to strut their stuff, all (combined) two flowports, six woofers, two kevlar midrange drivers, and two vapor-deposited synthetic diamond tweeters of them. It probably doesn’t hurt the NAD M3 amplifier to crank it up some as well, sort of like taking the car out on the freeway after a week of stop ‘n’ go city driving. So my idea was to throw caution to the winds and rattle the walls.

I let iTunes determine the order in which the eight Hallelujahs would be heard. (I use a Mac Mini as a media server; its digital stream is output via USB to a Benchmark DAC1 digital-to-analog converter, thence into the NAD amp and then into F&F’s majestic insides.)

Which meant that the first Hallelujah came from Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic, recorded in 1959 and sporting an all-star team of vocalists including Jon Vickers and Giorgio Tozzi. That also meant that the first Hallelujah is in the reorchestrated version by Eugene Goosens, which meant that the very first sound to come roaring out of F&F was a glorious cymbal crash. Triangles dingle during the repetitions of Hallelujah. Every player in the Mahlerian-sized orchestra is kept on his or her toes from beginning to end. The chorus sounds as though it’s big enough to write a constitution and form a government. The vocal lines are doubled in the brass; bass instruments add heft to an already grandiloquent sound. Percussion is used however and wherever needed to add glitter and glamour. The tempo is amazingly bright—one of the fastest ever in fact—and Beecham kicks things up with a rocket-propelled accelerando towards the end. The recorded sound is excellent by any standards, all the more impressive for 1959 (vintage RCA, produced by John Pfeiffer.) In short, it’s an unrepentantly un-HIP Messiah, Handel gone Respighi, certain to irritate the bejesus out of the urtext-only crowd. But it thrills me no end. I’m solidly in favor of HIP performances, but I know a good thing when I hear it—and this is a good thing. A very, very, very good thing.

Moving from Beecham’s technicolor-and-testosterone-injected whoop-dee-doo to John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, a Philips recording from 1982, was like leaving a massive celebration in the Piazza di San Marco and wandering into an afternoon tea hosted by Mrs. Prendergast of the Ladies’ Auxiliary League for the Propagation and Preservation of the Fine Arts. The pitch wasn’t the only thing to drop; the energy levels nose-dived as well. At first it all seemed so wan, so wee, so twee, so twitty, Handel bundled off to Harrow, there to file down his rough German edges. But actually the Gardiner performance has abundant spunk of its own, in its own way. It’s just that HIP groups come off like fireflies in the glare of Beecham’s kleig lights. One has to readjust before the really spirited, lively Gardiner performance can make itself heard. The Gardiner recording avoids a syndrome sometimes plaguing HIP recordings, which is the clever (and misleading) use of acoustics and microphone placement to make a small ensemble sound larger than it really is. Gardiner’s forces are large enough so the recording doesn’t resort to any inflationary tactics. The diction is crystal clear, the rhythms absolutely sharp. This gives the Hallelujah a distinct bounce, like an energetic sneaker-clad teenager bounding down the street. The tempo is rock-steady throughout; Gardiner has never been one for interpretative license along those lines. It’s a good Hallelujah, no doubt about it, but somebody had to follow the Beecham, and iTunes left John Eliot Gardiner holding the short straw.

If Gardiner fared poorly after the Beecham Imax treatment, René Jacobs and the Freiburg Barockorchester (Harmonia Mundi, 2006) received a nearly ideal placement in the scheme of things. The Jacobs group is small—little orchestra, tiny chorus—and the recording definitely makes use of a slappy-wet acoustic and microphone positioning in order to tart up the sound significantly. I have little doubt that this performance would be much less impressive heard live. But as it is, the thing’s a hoot. Jacobs is an opera conductor and former countertenor himself, and the dramatic flair that enhances his stunning Così fan tutte and Marriage of Figaro comes fully into play here as well. He has a great time adding crescendi, diminuendi, and orchestral detail within an overall steady tempo. Whether one agrees with his decisions or not, to hear so much creative thinking in a tried-and-true chestnut is incredibly refreshing. A few minutes with the Jacobs Messiah and you’re liable to recognize it ever after; it’s vivid, gutsy, original, and wholly captivating. And no other HIP recording comes anywhere near to Jacobs’s blow-the-roof-off ending of the Hallelujah; in its own way, it’s just as grandiloquently self-indulgent as the Beecham, and every bit as much fun.

Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort (Deutsche Grammophon, 1997) fall somewhere in between Gardiner’s chipper insouciance and Jacobs’s colorful originality. Once again a reverberant space and close microphones turn a small group into a large one. I was bothered a bit by what sounded to my ears as dynamic compression—an audio sin I don’t usually associate with Deutsche Grammophon. Nonetheless, this recording lacked a full dynamic range—everything stayed within one overall (loud, plush) level. Perhaps that’s due to the audio inflation. But it was obvious to my ears after the previous three recordings. The tempo is absolutely steady, and the brass playing as the chorus sings out “King of Kings!” is spectacular. I had trouble making out the text, though; that ultra-wet acoustic drowned out a lot of the diction. It’s a fine performance, to be sure, but to my ears came off rather poorly after the fascination of the Jacobs.

Edward Higginbotham and the Academy of Ancient Music (Naxos, 2000) take the HIP idea several steps farther. To begin with, they attempt to recreate the 1751 London performances, rather than concentrating on the 1742 Dublin texts. According to the liner notes, that meant using boy sopranos—I’m not so sure about that, but it makes for a very interesting, if uneven, performance. The tempo is overall a bit slower than most, but more than anything what you notice immediately is the raspy strings. They’re not unattractive by any means, but the change from the previous three HIP groups is startling. The boy sopranos make less of a difference than you might think. This is yet another wet-room-microphone-placement inflationary recording, in an exceptionally boomy room. The brass is aggressive and assertive, extremely effective in this piece. The occasional tempo change (“The kingdom of this Earth”) is refreshing, while I found the final chorus stabs at “King of Kings” to be rather lackluster. In some of the big moments, Higginbotham favors an emphatic tenuto, which might have worked better in an overall context of a faster tempo. But as it is, despite all of its many strong points, I found this one less satisfying.

John Butt and the Dunedin Consort (Linn, 2006) are scrupulous about using the 1742 Dublin edition. This particular recording benefits from exceptionally fine sonics, courtesy of audiophile label Linn Records—but they also inflate a small ensemble and chorus into something larger. At the same time, though, the sense of the enclosing space is palpable; it’s a doggone fine piece of audio engineering. The splendid brass players are really the stars here, much more so than the good-but-undistinguished chorus. Tempo remains absolutely steady throughout but, like Edward Higginbotham, Butt applies emphatic tenuti to certain climatic moments (King of Kings!); it works much better here given Butt’s brighter tempo. I couldn’t keep from noticing some odd diction from the chorus—why pronounce it King-dum? As I progressed through the movement, I was mentally awarding a middle-of-the-road status, but the splendid ending changed my mind somewhat.

With that I plunged into the very different world of Andrew Parrott and the Handel-Haydn Society who offer a live performance of Wolfgang Mozart’s revised Messiah. This one should be utterly fascinating, but alas a puffy acoustic and a lifeless performance spoil the fun. (I have the Mackerras recording of the Mozart version on order; I’ll be able to make a much better assessment with that one.) The performance never gets off the ground, mired as it is in terminal gentility. One gets a distinct impression that this would be a glorious Hallelujah—Mozart’s wind doublings alone promise splendor. But raspberries to this blah and ponderous slough. Parrott & Co. come damn close to making the Hallelujah Chorus boring, and that really takes some doing.

To end, iTunes presented me with a classic rendition, 1985’s Colin Davis and the London Symphony, featuring such splendid singers as Heather Harper and John Shirley-Quirk. The shrill recorded sound was just as shocking as the sudden rise back to concert pitch after all those HIP recordings. Alas, the Philips re-release of this great performance stems from a remastering made in the early days of digital technology, and like many such efforts, hard-edged and unattractive sound assaults the ear. However, I adjusted soon enough and could once again enjoy the unquestionable rightness of this performance. Even though it’s big-band Handel with a huge chorus, the orchestra is remarkably fleet-footed and clear, and the energy is every bit as infectious as any I’ve heard. This is grand-statement Handel, cleanly etched and but generous with the glory. Despite the substandard sound, this remains one of the all-time great Messiahs. I’ve heard that there may be a better remastering floating around out there somewhere; even if not, this performance absolutely cries out for a better release.

So my conclusions? For the HIP recordings, the Jacobs/Freiburg is to my taste the most interesting and compelling, while the Butt/Dunedin is probably overall the most reliable. I was so-so on the Higginbotham and I actively disliked the Parrott. I go with the herd in recommending the Davis/London for a great all-around Messiah, even if it isn’t HIP.

And everybody—and I do mean everybody—should hear the Beecham. Life is just too doggone short to pass up on such sensual, over-the-top magnificence. So put it on and crank up the volume. Don’t worry about what your neighbors or professors might think. To accompany, I suggest a double cheeseburger, hot fudge sundae with extra whipped cream, nuts and sprinkles, the whole washed down with a glass of good booze. Go for it, only once if necessary, but go for it.

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