Happy Messiahs and Unhappy Angels

If there were annual awards for concerts as there are for recordings, one of the leading candidates for last year would have to be the performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican given by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis (a recording of which has just been issued on LSO Live). Even as I write that, I can feel just how implausible it will sound. Even amongst modern-instrument orchestras, the LSO would not perhaps be the most obvious choice to play baroque music, and it cannot be said that Sir Colin’s choice of tempos has veered towards the fast or the fleet as he has got older. I confess that my own expectations before the concert were not great, and had Mark Padmore not been singing I probably would not have gone at all. I would then have missed the most gripping and satisfying performance of the Messiah I have heard. It was that rare thing - a performance of a completely familiar work that, without being in any way arch or gimmicky, makes it sound original and fresh. Revealingly, the only disappointment was the alto, Sara Mingardo, who has a very beautiful voice but rather approximate English diction. For what made the other singers so compelling, and that includes the chorus, was their keen sense of the words, both their rhythm and their meaning. What, however, was revelatory was Davis’s understanding of how the orchestral writing illuminates and reinforces what is being sung. Nothing was generic: every phrase - every trill, even - had a particular expressive point and always one that deepened the communication of the text. Simply, Davis, his singers, and his orchestra revealed the Messiah to be an even greater work than I at least had realised.

To celebrate Davis’s 80th birthday, the LSO are putting on a series of performances of major choral works, which started with Haydn’s Creation last weekend (7th October). Whereas I went to Messiah with guarded expectations and was then bowled over, I went to the Creation chastened and with correspondingly high hopes - and was slightly disappointed. Partly this was because Handel’s score loses less when played on modern instruments than does Haydn’s. Partly, too, whilst the LSO chorus sang with impressive precision and energy in the Creation, they obviously do not have the same sophistication of tone and phrasing that a professional choir such as Tenebrae has and that we are now used to in this music. Davis was also rather less successful in his choice of soloists. Dietrich Henschel, it is true, was tremendous as both Raphael and Adam. Neither Sally Matthews nor Ian Bostridge really convinced in their angelic roles, however, conveying little in the way of joy or wonder at the marvels of creation they were recounting. Matthews sang musically and in tune, but her voice was too steely and her delivery too monochrome. Her Gabriel was an official angel, reporting back to the board - definitely pleased to note constant progress, but unwilling to gush. To be fair, she was better suited and more relaxed as Eva in Part III, though even then her German lacked a worryingly high number of its usual consonants. Bostridge, of course, is a highly expressive singer, but his natural expressivity does now rather tend towards the mournful. As his voice has grown in power, it smiles less easily than it used to. His Uriel sounded as if he knew all along that things were going to go wrong, which really isn’t what Haydn intended. Still, the Creation is such an inventive and joyful work, and Davis conducted with such an obvious affection for it, that even an angst-ridden angel couldn’t quite dampen the spirits.