St. Thomas, Trinity Church, David Geffen and Carnegie Hall: The Many Ways to Handle ‘Messiah’
Throughout December, Messiah is nearly inescapable in New York City churches and concert halls. To explore some of the many options available to eager Christmas Handelians, I attended four of the city’s best-known versions and found them remarkably different yet often deeply satisfying in their individual approaches to this perennial masterpiece.
It’s perhaps surprising that Handel’s Messiah has become so closely associated with Christmas as it is most appropriately performed at Easter. Though Part One does involve the Nativity, the work’s most celebrated number—“The Hallelujah Chorus”—closes the second section and celebrates Christ’s resurrection. But at Easter, one is likely to instead encounter Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, another sacred baroque landmark.
As Handel’s Italian operas began to lose favor in London in the 1730s, the German-born composer turned more and more to English-language oratorios, choral works on religious subjects. Handel composed a good number of them, but Messiah differs markedly from the rest. Saul or Theodora, for example, are music dramas featuring characters interacting much as they would in an opera. But the soloists in Messiah, set to Biblical excerpts from the King James Version assembled by Charles Jennens, aren’t portraying individuals but are instead relating incidents in Christ’s life and death. This unusual presentation allowed Handel to tinker with his work after its 1742 Dublin premiere, and he often changed the arias and recitatives based on the soloists available to him at the time. Eventually, a more or less standard version was adopted, and the Messiahs I heard performed at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, Trinity Church, David Geffen Hall and Carnegie Hall were consistent in allocating the solos.
Otherwise, the four varied considerably in the kinds of instruments used and, most crucially, in the size and makeup of their choruses. St. Thomas and Trinity employed period-instrument ensembles: New York Baroque Incorporated and Trinity Baroque Orchestra, respectively. Though the number of orchestra members remained roughly the same among the four performances, the pair employing instruments modeled on those from Handel’s time played with more bite and color than did members of the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestra of the Oratorio Society of New York on modern strings, winds and brass. The use of “historically-informed performance” (HIP) approaches at St. Thomas and Trinity also aligned with their warmer, more reverberant church acoustics.
The make-up of the four choruses accounted for the most striking differences between performances. St. Thomas is noted worldwide for adhering to the Anglican tradition with its Choir of Men and Boys. Adorned in scarlet robes, twenty-one boy sopranos combined with thirteen adult altos, tenors and basses to produce, under Jeremy Filsell’s direction, a uniquely ethereal sound. Though they mostly stayed in tune, the boys proved the biggest obstacle to my enjoyment of Filsell’s striking interpretation. Though many in number, together they produced a sometimes weakly pallid sound in Handel’s many demanding choruses. By comparison, Trinity’s contingent of eight adult female sopranos under Dame Jane Glover’s dynamic leadership soared thrillingly, though their avoidance of vibrato (a common HIP technique) might have sounded odd to those unfamiliar with “straight tone.”
The securely forthright forty members of Musica Sacra joined the NY Phil in a tidy though bland Messiah thanks to Ton Koopman’s safely unassertive vision of the score. The choral textures came across most clearly in Geffen’s clean acoustic, which also emphasized the strong but overly homogenized sound of the modern-instrument orchestra. Ken Tritle, who prepared the Musica Sacra chorus, was also the conductor of OSNY’s Carnegie Hall presentation in which he commanded its mighty chorus of nearly one hundred and eighty voices! Despite their number, in Messiah’s first section, they produced a softer, more diffuse sound than Trinity’s twenty-six! But with the subsequent drama of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, they came alive and grew in unanimity and force as they approached “Hallelujah,” which produced the expected burst of wild applause from the Geffen crowd which obediently stood—as did all four audiences—for that rousing number. Remarkable, too, was the precision of OSNY’s big group, which devoutly executed the many challenging florid passages that dot Handel’s music.
The difficult coloratura of the bass arias in Messiah nearly defeated several of the soloists. St. Thomas’s David Soar, a recent Wagnerian veteran, labored mightily through his music, sounding most comfortable in his concluding “The trumpet shall sound.” For the NY Phil, baroque specialist Klaus Mertens lightened his sound with some success to negotiate the clusters of black notes, but OSNY’s Joseph Parrish fared best, his vibrant bass-baritone tackled his music with reasonable agility and bite. Trinity’s traditional unique solution to Messiah’s solos is to assign each to a chorus member, a practice which inevitably resulted in some unevenness but brought a moving warmth to the evening. Of its bass members, Steven Hrycelak and Enrico Lagasca stood out in their solos.
Trinity’s tenor Andrew Fuchs began the performance with a particularly stylish “Every valley,” so different from Rufus Müller’s intensely dramatic if worn traversal of that opening aria. In the remainder of his music, Müller’s welcome intensity brought back memories of his much-acclaimed Evangelist in Jonathan Miller’s landmark staging of the St. Matthew Passion. Joshua Blue’s operatic repertoire includes works by Verdi and Puccini which might explain his unusually muscular approach to Handel for OSNY. He did, however, demonstrate a commendable ease in the more elaborate pages of his music. For the NY Phil, Kieran White’s light tenor was taxed by some of the more dramatic moments in Part Two, but his clear diction and hearty engagement made him shine among Koopman’s bumpy quartet.
The four performances split Handel’s alto music between women and men. St. Thomas’s Emily Marvosh often sounded disappointingly thin, but her arresting way with the words made her “He was despised” particularly touching. Trinity presented both mezzos and countertenors with the former crew winning the laurels. Koopman brought along Dutch countertenor Maarten Engeltjes whose delicately hooty instrument left scant impression, while Tritle countered with Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, perhaps America’s best countertenor, whose vibrant and seamless voice stands apart from many in his vocal category. However, Cohen sounded less than his usual best at Carnegie Hall; alone of all the soloists I heard, he referred intently and often to his score and sometimes sounded a bit unsure. Yet his innate musicality and burnished voice still made much of Handel’s superb alto arias.
Nola Richardson, OSNY’s soprano, often performs 18th-century music, but her thin, wiry voice proved strangely off-putting for much of the evening. However, she was transformed in Part Three, where her “I know my redeemer liveth” and “If God be for Us” were truly lovely. Koopman’s Maya Kherani, too, was uneven, beautiful phrases alternated with harsh high ornaments, and she ultimately made little impact. For St. Thomas, Emily Donato surprised by taking on with easy élan the rarely heard bouncy alternate version of “Rejoice greatly.” She beautifully partnered Marvosh in “He shall feed his flock.” But the single finest solo of my Messiah Marathon was Elisse Albian’s ravishing “I know my redeemer liveth” at Trinity: simply heaven-sent.
Only OSNY performed Messiah in its entirety, giving Cohen and Blue the sole opportunity to duet in “O death, where is thy sting,” during which Carnegie Hall staff quietly scurried to remove an audience member in the front row who had fainted. Koopman made the oddest cuts: inexplicably omitting “His Yoke is easy” at the conclusion of Part One and the tenor’s aria just before “Hallelujah.” Both St. Thomas and Trinity removed several important numbers from Part Three, fearing that some of its crowd might find the remainder of the work anticlimactic after “Hallelujah.” In fact, Tritle chastised audience members he spotted fleeing before Part Three began.
The 2024 Messiah Palm must go to Dame Jane, whose tirelessly energetic leadership of her Trinity forces (she’s 75!) made Handel’s long-familiar work sound fresh and new with her commandingly propulsive reading that brought out the best in her really excellent orchestra and chorus. The intimacy of Trinity with 650 seats, fewer than one-quarter the capacity of Carnegie Hall—added to its specialness though its uncushioned pews can prove challenging during the nearly three-hour running time.
But each of these fine long-running Messiah traditions—some going back well over one hundred years—assure that their sold-out audiences will be thrilled and touched by Handel’s oratorio for either their first—or twentieth time!