George Frederick HANDEL (1685-1759)
Messiah, HWV 56 [169.18]
Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Magnificat in D, BWV 243 [31.00]
Handel: Jennifer Vyvyan (soprano), Norma Procter (contralto), George Maran (tenor), Owen Brannigan (bass), George Malcolm (harpsichord), Ralph Downes (organ)
London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra/Sir Adrian Boult
Bach: Eileen McLoughlin, Heather Harper (sopranos), Alfred Deller (counter-tenor), Wilfred Brown (tenor), Maurice Bevan (bass), St Anthony Singers, Thornton Lofthouse (harpsichord), Denis Vaughan (organ)
Kalmar Orchestra/Pierre Colombo
rec. 4-13 January 1954, Kingsway Hall, London (Handel), 1955, London (Bach).
Mono
ELOQUENCE 484 0411 [3 CDs: 200.47]
A good many years ago (more than I care to remember), when I was a choirboy singing in performances of Handel’s Messiah, I saved up my pocket money over a period of months to buy the three Decca Ace of Clubs LPs containing this 1954 performance conducted by Sir Adrian Boult – it was then the only set readily available at less than a prohibitively expensive full price. It might therefore be thought that this review could be a nostalgic trip down memory lane, wherein any and every fault could be excused; in the event it is not quite that, but my distant memories had not totally deceived me and the performance well deserves its reissue on Decca’s Eloquence label (at a comparative fraction of what even those old Ace of Clubs LPs cost).
Of course, times and performing styles have moved on a great deal over the past seventy years or so, but in 1954 this set was nevertheless pioneering in a number of ways. In the first place, it was performed by a body of singers and players which attempted to approximate the forces available in Handel’s own day – at least, it jettisoned the long-established tradition of giving the score with massive choirs and bolstered orchestras. Then, too, it attempted to restore Handel’s own orchestration, which for a long time had been performed in editions by Mozart, Prout and later well-meaning improvers. Lastly, following in the once iconoclastic footsteps of Beecham, it set the trend for taking Handel’s speeds at their face valuation, stripping away decades of pseudo-religious varnish which had dictated the employment of speeds which were invariably ponderous and sometimes positively funereal.
This approach, using a new edition of Handel’s score edited by Julian Herbage, was aided and abetted by a team of solo singers three of whom came from the circle that surrounded the English Opera Group and Benjamin Britten. Jennifer Vyvyan would shortly go on to create the role of the Governess in The turn of the screw, a recording which to this day retains a central place in the history of the work and in which she displayed a talent for dramatic involvement which might previously have been unsuspected. In this Messiah she assumes the mantle of Isobel Baillie, the principal exponent of the soprano role in the previous generation, but her voice although clearly cut from the same cloth has a richer tone than the thin cutting edge of her predecessor. Norma Procter, then at the very outset of a long and distinguished career in the mezzo and contralto repertory which encompassed everything up to and including Mahler, has a clean tone and avoids any hint of the plumminess which was a besetting sin of British contraltos of the school of Clara Butt; she does not have the full-bodied depth of voice of Kathleen Ferrier, but she comes a very close second with overtones of counter-tenor delivery. Owen Brannigan, slightly older than his Aldeburgh confrères, brings plenty of life and character to his bass solos and displays a talent for clarity in his running passages which completely eclipses the often woolly approach of many of his rivals on disc. The odd man out here is the American George Maran, who delivers ringingly clear tone but does not altogether avoid the close-throated style associated with English cathedral and collegiate tenors over the years; he subsequently made a long-running career in German opera houses.
It is with Maran too that one notes, with some surprise in these more enlightened times, the total lack of ornamentation applied to the vocal lines. It seems very odd today to hear his opening recitative Comfort ye without the slightest hint of decoration to Handel’s baldly declaimed lines; but then, almost no recordings of Messiah dared to depart from the time-honoured text as enshrined in Novello editions for quite a few years to come. The lack of ornamentation is a handicap, too, for Procter and Brannigan, whose delivery of the da capo sections of their lengthy arias He was despised and The trumpet shall sound suffers from the conspicuous lack of any variety (it is, I imagine, likely that exactly the same takes were employed for these in the recording). It is this lack of variety which conjures up some degree of sympathy for the habit in earlier years of making cuts in Handel’s score, but to its credit this edition gives us Messiah absolutely complete, even though on CD this means that the performance spreads onto a third disc given some of Boult’s ample speeds. There is some attempt made to comply with period practice in the matter of cadential trills, but this are erratically applied and blunt endings to recitatives are readily to be found.
Boult returned to Messiah in stereo a decade later (when Joan Sutherland at least managed to introduce some ornamentation into her vocal line) but despite its more resonant sound the chorus had a tendency to become over-emphatic and ponderous in such sections as Worthy is the lamb. Here, the chorus, still relatively large in size by modern standards, nevertheless have plenty of spring in their step and manage to display a remarkable crispness of both speed and diction in For unto us a child is born – which is succeeded by an unabridged full-length Pastoral Symphony which may be unfashionably slow but has a charming sense of style. And none of the singers, solo or chorus, ever has recourse to that besetting sin of the period: the insertion of unwarranted and unwanted aspirates to lend definition to Handel’s running lines of quavers.
Those looking for a performance of Messiah with period instruments and historically informed styles of singing and playing will of course have no truck with a recording which stands principally as an example of performing practice in the period immediately following the Second World War. Those looking for a performance which takes advantage of modern instruments and styles without departing significantly from the score of Messiah to which they have become accustomed may well find that this recording is the answer to their search, although on a personal level I would suggest that the recording made in the following decade by Colin Davis, enshrining the traditional text but with the addition of well-judged vocal decorations by a peerless cast of solo singers, will come closer to their ideal.
What should surely not influence their decision is the addition on the third disc of this set of a slightly later recording of Bach’s Magnificat made for Decca’s sister label Oiseau-Lyre. Although this, too, seeks to take advantage of contemporary views on period style, the sheer inadequacy of much of the performance militates against any sense either of discovery or pleasure. Messiah was recorded in the generous acoustic of Kingsway Hall; the date and venue of the Magnificat recording is not stated, but it sounds confined and boxy – an effect not assisted by the over-close placement of the microphones – and the chorus sounds under-manned and under-rehearsed, quite a shock after the sonorous Amen at the end of Messiah. The speeds adopted by Pierre Colombo don’t do them many favours, either. Nor is the solo singing of such quality as to rectify the balance; only Alfred Deller, Wilfred Brown and Heather Harper (in one of her earliest recordings, although banished to a single part in one number) sound at all comfortable, and Eileen McLoughlin as the soprano who gets the lion’s share of the solo work sounds distinctly nervous in her tentative launch into Omnes generationes. The best single number in the whole is Esurientes where Deller is partnered by some quite well played recorders (the soloists are uncredited); otherwise, this is a performance where later versions from the likes of Munchinger and Richter enshrine the same style of delivery more convincingly.
Nonetheless, Decca Eloquence deserves our thanks for the restoration of this Messiah to the catalogue, and all the more so for the provision of an entirely new booklet note which extends to not only an introduction to the music but also provides some valuable biographical background on the singers involved, some of whose names may well be totally unfamiliar even to listeners whose memories stretch back to the period. (For some reason, probably an editorial oversight, Brown’s contribution to the Magnificat escapes a mention.) The activities of Eloquence in their exploration of obscure areas of the huge Universal back catalogue continue to delight, amaze and surprise in equal proportions – to such an extent that the occasional mis-hit can be easily forgiven. This Messiah may have been superseded by later versions in more ways than one, but it was never a mis-hit.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
