Messiah by John Eliot Gardiner

John Eliot Gardiner conducted this recording production of Handel’s Messiah in 1982. The orchestra is English Baroque Soloists and the choir is Monteverdi Choir.

John Eliot Gardiner’s orchestration is agile and highly polished. But because I was expecting the very vibrant orchestration like the one in his Gluck’s opera Orphee et Eurydice, I was little surprised to find out that his orchestration in this recording sounded more formal and stately. It was still vibrant and lively but sounded gentler, softer and gracious. And everything about this recording felt genuine, natural and heart-felt.

This must be the very conscious choice of the musical direction by him because these can be said also about the solo singers and the choir. They all have softer, gentler and pristine beautiful voices. And they all sung very well in such manners.

Tenor, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson’s voice is beautiful and richer than when I listened to him in Vivaldi’s La verita in cimento in Jean-Christophe Spinosi’s production. He sung really well in this production. He sung, “Comfort ye”,  “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted” and “Thou shalt break him” especially well.

Soprano, Margaret Marshall has very beautiful, pure pristine voice. I love her aria “Rejoice greatly” which has the refined simplicity.  This aria was not my favorite aria until I listened to her rendition.

Mezzo-soprano, Catherine Robbin has similar voice texture with Margaret Marshall’s. She has decisive, very illumines beautiful voice. She sung “Thou didst not leave” and together with Margaret Marshall, she sung aria “He shall feed his flock” wonderfully.

Countertenor, Charles Brett’s light voice is clean, clear, bright and pristine. His voice also has the genuine simplicity. And his aria “He was despised” was the most heart felt wonderful rendition.

Boy soprano, Saul Quirke also sung very well.

Bass, Robert Hale has beautiful and powerful rich voice. But he’s the only solo singer who is not as strong in emotional expression as the rest of the other solo singers.

The choir by Monteverdi Choir is another best quality of this production. They used only 31 singers for all the four voice ranges. And there is no single mezzo-soprano singer and all mezzo-soprano parts are sung by countertenors. As the result, the transition between the head voices and the chest voices are smooth as the suave flows of different voice ranges within the choir.  Their sounds are so smooth, there are times I couldn’t tell apart the tenor from the countertenor voices.

I read the very interesting story about the performance history of this oratorio. This oratorio was one of Handel’s a few most famous works, which had escaped complete obscurity as the rest of his other great large amount of works during Classical and Romantic eras. As matter of fact, this oratorio has been performed most frequently but over time, it has been performed with increasing number of instruments and choir singers (Mozart also rescored it with additional wind instruments for the larger production.) The sheer scale of these performances had skyrocketed over time and in the1881 NY performance, they used 250 instrumentalists with 2,750 choir singers. Another US performance used 500 instrumentalists with close to 10, 000 voices. Romantic era was the peak of large-scaled music. They’d thought these changes are something Handel would naturally welcome.

But in this last 50 years, with Baroque music revival, there has been the movement to perform Baroque works in more authentic style using authentic instruments and smaller number of performers as Handel performed in his time.

And according to the production note written by John Eliot Gardiner himself, they tried to perform this production as much as authentic methods accordingly to the Handel’s original scores. This production used only 31 instrumentalists and 31 choir singers. Many performances of this oratorio I watched or listened to had much larger number of performers. 

As the result, the effect is immediate. The music is more detail nuanced, gentler and more intimate that is well matched with the deeply meditative libretto by Charles Jennens.

Messiah is different from the two other Handel’s oratorios, Saul and Theodora I listened to. These two oratorios had specific characters, the narratives and the story lines. But Messiah doesn’t have any of them. In itself is like poetry, or more like sonnets. The excerpts for libretto came mostly from the Old Testament, which is often more poetic than the New Testament.

It can be said in both Messiah and Saul; the words Jennens picked from the Bibles for these oratorios are very simple but appealing, mythical and thoughtful.  Along with Handel’s psychologically deep and overwhelmingly beautiful music, they created masterpiece work, which falls and sinks into people’s hearts deeply and profoundly. Messiah is such great work of art.

And this is such wonderful recording.