SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Handel, Messiah: Karina Gauvin (soprano), Marie-Nicole Lemieux (contralto), Tilman Lichdi (tenor), Andrew-Foster Williams (bass), members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Labadie (conductor), New York Choral Artists, Joseph Flummerfelt (director), Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, 14.12.2010. (SSM)

There was a time when each generation of concertgoers knew exactly what to expect when attending a performance of the Messiah. Handel's first performance is claimed to have consisted of a chorus of twelve to sixteen singers and an orchestra of strings (4.3.2.2.1), two trumpets, timpani, harpsichord and/or organ. Later generations expected the performances to be the aural counterpart of a fireworks display: the bigger the better. This reached its height of absurdity at the Handel commemoration ceremony in London in 1859, the hundredth anniversary of his death, where a chorus of 2,765 and an orchestra of 460 performed the work. This practice irked George Bernard Shaw enough to rave that Handel's music "is murdered by the tradition of the big chorus! People think that four thousand singers must be four thousand times as impressive as one." New York was no slouch either when it came to huge choirs and orchestras. Its celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Handel and Haydn Society included a performance of the Messiah with over 600 trained chorus members. As ersatz audiophiles feel that the louder they can turn up their amplifiers, the better is their equipment and musical experience, so did those generations of concertgoers assume that the more musicians playing, the better the performance would be.

Before the arrival in the 1970s of early music revisionists, one was likely to see, if not quite these grand numbers of musicians, certainly full choruses and orchestras. Tonight's performance was somewhere in the middle in terms of size with a chorus and orchestra of roughly forty each. Today, though, one can't even assume that a particular conductor will perform in his specialized style. Mr. Labadie has led his early music group, Les Violins du Roi, for the past twenty-five years. Although his performance tonight was by no means weak, I wonder how different a performance it might have been if he had conducted his usual band instead of the members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Although all the parts in this performance do constitute a whole, I wonder if they may constitute more than the sum of the parts in later performances.

As would be expected from a Baroque conductor, Mr. Labadie favored brisk tempi, which reminded me in "Why Do the Nations" of the snappy style of the current Italian fast-as-you-can style of playing Baroque music. At other times, I would have wished for a more polished sound from the vibrato-less strings. Mr. Labadie used to good effect the dynamics that Handel never notated in his scores, but not to an extent that made the music sound Romantic. Mr. Labadie's fellow countrywomen, Marie-Nicole Lemieux and Karina Gauvin, both of whose voices I admire from their recordings of Baroque operas, suffered from problems that, again, might have dissipated at later concerts. Ms. Lemieux , for example, in "He was despised" seemed to be disclaiming instead of singing her aria. Ms. Gauvin, her voice pure and crystalline at times, was slightly constricted and screechy at others. The bass, Andrew-Foster Williams, recovered quickly from a wobbly start in his opening recitative, "Thus saith the lord of hosts," to sing a riveting rendition of "Why Do the Nations." Tilman Lichdi, tenor, did justice to the few arias he performed.

The chorus produced the best music of the evening. Attentive to every gesture from Mr. Labadie, these vocalists clearly articulated their lines without letting the words lead the music. Mr. Labadie, conducting without a score, enthusiastically and with much physicality was able to leap up in the air at peak moments without having to worry about coming down on a music stand. Some of the transitions between movements could have been played attaca and the “Hallelujah Chorus” seemed to catch the audience by surprise.

Being a completist, I question why, other than for reasons of time, movements are excised from whole works. Certainly, if the music were poorly written, dramatically illogical or of questionable authenticity, it could be cut. But this is not the case here. I missed particularly the lovely brief duet, "O Death where is thy sting" and the contralto aria, "If God be for us." There are few works other than the Messiah that are so consistently inspiring from beginning to end, each movement being a masterpiece in its own right and each excision a stolen work of art.

Stan Metzger