George Friderick HANDEL (1685-1759)
Messiah
(1741)
Dora Labbette (soprano); Muriel Brunskill (contralto); Hubert Eisdell (tenor);
Harold Williams (bass)
BBC Choir and Orchestra/ Sir Thomas Beecham
rec. June-July 1927, Central Hall, Westminster.
PRISTINE PACO129 [61:03 + 63:05]
I suppose that it is just the way of the world that a performance
which, when given, is at the cutting edge of style will eventually be regarded
as the very epitome of the out-of-date. When Beecham gave a performance of
Messiah in Queen’s Hall in December 1926 with essentially the
same forces as this recording, it was regarded as groundbreaking. The contralto
of this recording, Muriel Brunskill, is quoted in Pristine’s booklet
as recalling that “His tempi for this work, which are now taken for
granted, were revolutionary; he entirely revitalised it, the old slow progress
was gone forever”. These performances of 1926 and 1927 were the first
to make any attempt to perform Messiah with at least a nod to a style
which Handel might have expected. Now, the single fact that he uses the Prout
orchestration relegates it to the category of the quaint. This is unfair,
and any but the very blindest member of the “authenticity Taliban”
should be able to listen to this set and be astonished at its power and sheer
life.
Beecham assembled a set of soloists to put into practice his new concept who
were comparatively young; Labbette was 29 and Brunskill 28; the men were a
little older, with Eisdell at 35 and Williams 34, and all do a splendid job.
Dora Labbette first worked with Beecham in the Queen’s Hall performance
(she always said that he chose her when he saw her photograph at her agents’
offices). She became Beecham’s long-term lover and the mother of his
son Paul Strang until she was abandoned in the most callous way when he fell
for the pianist Betty Humby in 1941. The shock of this essentially finished
her career. “The stuffing went out of me and I really felt that I didn’t
want to sing any more” she told their son, and in 1943, aged only 45,
she retired. Hers is a very typically English soprano voice of the period
– sweet, light, very little vibrato, rather shallow in tone but very
attractive in her somewhat limited repertoire. Labbette’s timbre is
quite similar to the sort of soprano that is now thought of as “authentic”
in pre-19th century music. Her performance is lovely, with a real
tenderness in “He shall feed his flock” and “How beautiful
are the feet” and some exquisitely poised high notes. She is not quite
so successful in “Rejoice greatly”; Beecham takes this at a very
fast tempo, and she can’t quite manage the runs at his speed. “I
know that my redeemer liveth” is also a little disappointing, there
is not the inwardness I had hoped for and the recording is at its worst in
the distortion on the voice.
Muriel Brunskill is a real contralto, not a modern-day mezzo, but do not imagine
that this comes with the sort of grinding gear-change into a baritone chest
register of the Clara Butt stereotype. She is a sensitive and musical singer
with a soft-grained timbre, though she does possess an opulent lower register
which gives a wonderfully effective depth in “He shall feed his flock”
and, even more so, “He was despised”. Hubert Eisdell is a fine
tenor with a positively heroic tone at times – very different from the
“authentic” tenor of today. He has an very good top with a resonance
which was not always to be found in English tenors of this period. He also
has excellent breath control and a florid technique which allows him to negotiate
some of the runs with real virtuosity. His enunciation has great clarity,
though he has an odd way of shading “o” sounds into “a”
– “your God” becomes “yar God” and “thy
holy one” “thy holy wan”. The tenor sequence in Part 2 is
very touchingly done with real character and even the odd appoggiatura, but
the highlight is “Thou shalt break them”. Beecham takes this at
a positively frenetic pace, with Eisdell responding heroically and interpolating
a top A at his final cadence, after which Beecham whips the orchestra on in
a tremendous accelerando to the finishing post. This must have left them open-mouthed
in astonishment in 1926, but is absolutely thrilling.
I think the finest of the soloists is Harold Williams, the bass, or more accurately
bass-baritone, as his low notes are good but do not have the depth and resonance
of his top. He has a truly commanding presence which leaps out of the speakers;
his first utterance, “Thus saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts”,
sets the tone for all that follows. He is great story-teller - listen to “Behold
I tell you a mystery” - and is positively operatic in the way that he
characterises every word. One of the ways in which he achieves this is in
the great freedom with which he treats the rhythm and note values, giving
naturalistic speech rhythms to the recitatives. His delivery of these is like
that of a great orator. He is also technically first-rate, with excellent
runs even at the breakneck tempo at which Beecham takes “Why do the
nations?”.
The choral side of things is on a distinctly lower level. I have always thought
that the only aspect of musical performance in which the past has nothing
to teach us is in choral music. As a member of my local amateur Rochester
Choral Society, I can honestly say that we beat the BBC Choir hands down in
every respect. They are undoubtedly enthusiastic, but the blend, the tuning,
the accuracy of the runs and the actual sound seem absolutely amateur, in
the pejorative sense, to ears accustomed to the sound of the professional
and semi-professional choirs of today. The tenors are particularly painful,
with a strangulated, back-of-the-throat vocal production without any vibrato
or resonance making them sound like a choir of Douglas Hurds (for those who
remember the Tory cabinet minister of 25 years ago). There is an almost football-terrace
crudeness to their delivery at times.
The presiding genius over all this is, of course, Beecham. What will probably
be surprising, to a casual modern listener with no real knowledge of old recordings,
is how unlike the stereotype of “pre-authentic” performance it
is. The feel is not stodgy, it does not plod along with a sanctimonious religiosity,
everything doesn’t go at a funereal pace – in fact some of the
tempi are far faster than most modern performances. The Prout orchestration
will no doubt seem bizarre, though the recorded balance of the orchestra is
so string-heavy that the additional wind parts barely register most of the
time. The tempi, which seem in most cases simply standard to us, were revolutionary
at the time. If we compare Messiah recordings from the 1900 to 1920
period (for example Sydney Coltham’s “Comfort ye” and “Every
valley” from about 1920) the difference between what Beecham did and
the Victorian tradition is obvious. There are, of course, still some remnants
of the old ways, particularly in the chorus numbers. Beecham still includes
some of the internal speed variations such as the sudden slowing-down at “That
they may offer unto the Lord” in “And he shall purify” and
“The kingdom of this earth” in “Hallelujah”, but other
choruses such as “He trusted in them” and “Let us break
our bonds asunder” are taken at a lick which would have terrified a
standard chorus of the time.
Incidentally, one of things about this recording which has perplexed people
ever since the set was issued is that the final “Amen” chorus
was not recorded. This apparently bizarre omission means that the work ends
on the dominant, and for the purposes of Pristine’s transfer, Andrew
Rose has interpolated the “Amen” from Beecham’s 1947 recording.
In John Lucas’s excellent biography “Thomas Beecham, An Obsession
with Music”, he tells us that at the 1926 Queen’s Hall performance,
Beecham cut the “Amen” and transposed the “Hallelujah Chorus”
to its place as the final number, so presumably this was the reason the “Amen”
was not recorded. I wonder if Beecham had intended that the “Hallelujah
Chorus” should be the final side of the set; if he did, clearly the
people at Columbia either did not realise or chose to ignore his wishes.
A little surprisingly, given that it was hugely popular before the war and
used to turn up regularly in junk shops, this set has had very few reissues.
In fact I know of only two; an single LP of excerpts which EMI put out in
1977 and a Pearl transfer of the full set in 1990. Part of the reason is that
Beecham recorded Messiah a further couple of times. His 1947 set
is equally lacking in reissues, partly because it falls into that period when
EMI and Victor were jointly commissioning recordings, and now no-one knows
exactly who owns the rights to them, so neither company has reissued it since
the very flat and subdued LP transfer that EMI put out in 1953. The final
stereo set was made in 1959 in an orchestration by Eugene Goossens which has
always seemed to me to have a Technicolor crudeness that puts it beyond acceptability,
but which has completely overshadowed both previous recordings. The other
reason is that the recording poses some serious problems. Even in 1927, Columbia
were producing some spectacularly good recordings, but unfortunately this
is not among them. There is inherent distortion on a good number of the sides
and the orchestral sound is distant and muddy with poor instrumental balance.
There is also considerable pitch-drift over many sides and some obvious “knob-twiddling”
causes volume fluctuation within chorus numbers, a particularly noticeable
example being in “Behold the Lamb of God”. The distortion and
volume fluctuations are beyond present techniques of restoration, though a
recently-developed software called Capstan has been employed which has completely
cured the pitch drift. Mark Obert-Thorn, who transferred the set, has made
an excellent job of it. He has tamed the distortion as much as possible and
eliminated surface noise to an extent that makes it negligible to my ears.
The sound is bright and immediate and the solo voices for the most part come
over very well.
Paul Steinson
Previous review: Curtis Rogers
Availability |