mastermessiah

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Arts Messiah - Masterwork Chorus and Others by David Sear On Thursday evening December 23, 2004, at Carnegie Hall, The Masterwork Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by their music director Andrew Megill, gave the last of their several Christmas season performances of George Frederic Handel’s Messiah. Since its first performance in Dublin in 1742 this monumental work of Handel’s has been performed thousands of times, by choruses as large as large as 2765 voices with an accompanying orchestra of 460 and by much smaller ensembles returning to the original size and style of Handel’s first performance. Mr. Megill, with approximately eighty voices of the Masterwork Chorus and an orchestra of about thirty, kept the tempos moving and with meticulous attention to detail made it a joy to follow the subjects of the fugues as they entered and developed in For Unto Us A Child is Born and other choruses.

The chorus and orchestra were clearly the stars of the evening. The performance got off to a good start with the clear round tones and rich vibrato of tenor Nathan Davis singing Comfort Ye and Every Valley, where he captured the emotional content of the words. He continued to do a fine job in the recitatives of the second half. Less successful was the work of the other soloists. The baritone David Allen Newman, although he possesses a fine voice and is an accomplished singer, did not have the strength in the low notes of his register to deliver a moving performance. The soprano Sally Wolf had a hard edge to her voice that reduced the beauty of Rejoice Oh Greatly and other airs. The mezzo-soprano Alyson Harvey consistently struck the wrong emotional color her arias, for example substituting anger for pathos in He Was Despised and Rejected; the only exception to this was where she joined tenor Nathan Davis in the duet O Death, Where Is Thy Sting, where they got the emotional content right and had a nice blend. Fortunately for the audience, the emotional content missing from the soloists was supplied under them by the orchestra.

This reviewer has heard countless performances of Messiah, several done by the Masterwork Chorus, the last one being conducted by David Randolph just before he retired. That was a magnificent concert, and with other soloists the current Masterwork Chorus should be able to recapture the grandeur which was theirs.

In contrast, on the previous evening West Park Presbyterian Church (Amsterdam Avenue and 86^th Street) presented a spectacular concert of vocal music, which included excerpts from Messiah. Tenor Sean Fallen sang Comfort Ye…Every Valley in a bright lyric performance, followed by mezzo soprano Mary Ann Stewart singing O Thou That Tellest Good Tiding to Zion, with Kamal Khan at the piano. These singers missed none of the emotional content of Messiah. Just as Handel’s first performance of Messiah was for charity where admission was half a guinea, admission to West Park was by donation of a warm coat or five cans of food for the homeless, which stood in sharp contrast to the $75 ticket price for Messiah at Carnegie Hall. With some of our leaders today waging war in the name of spreading our values and freedom, the values of the Prince of Peace were truly represented at West Park Church, where the purpose was to end hunger and homelessness and bring peace. This is an annual event that takes place there every year at Christmas time and is produced by the opera soprano Lauren Flanigan, who brings a distinguished cast of soloists from the Metropolitan and New York City operas. Though mostly opera, the program also included a beautiful set of spirituals sung by tenor Philip Creech with a very moving improvised piano accompanied by Micah Brashear, and an exciting selection of gospel songs sung by the Ebony Ecumenical Ensemble.

For your further listening pleasure this reviewer highly recommends the Apollo’s Fire recording of Messiah with The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra conducted by Jeannette Sorrell. (Onda Records, Inc. P.O. Box 24849 Cleveland, OH). It is not only a superb recording that captures the emotional content of Messiah but is also beautifully packaged with interesting liner notes.