Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Smith: The Seasons

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host, Keith Brown, writes:

Oftentimes at the end of the year I present one or another of the two famous oratorios The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801). This time around why not listen to The Seasons oratorio by John Christopher Smith the Younger (1712-95), son of Handel's copyist. You have heard something of J. C. Smith's work before, when on Sunday, March 9, 2003 I broadcast the Naxos recording of Nabal (1764), a posthumous pastiche of a Handel oratorio. For Nabal, Smith assembled and arranged various Handelian numbers, and wrote his own recitative passages linking them all together.

Entirely of his own composition is The Seasons (1740), a setting of lines from the Scottish poet James Thomson's popular pastoral poem which concludes with a Hymn on the Seasons. (Some of this versification found its way into the German language libretto that Baron Van Swieten prepared for Haydn's Die Jahreszeiten.) German readers had long enjoyed Thomson's poem in translation. Their admiration for it is carried forward into our own times in a 2014 Christophorus compact disc issue of Smith's oratorio.

That German label has picked up the Musica Franconia recording of this work (a world premiere on disc?), made in co-production with Bavarian Radio. In the 2012 festival performance of The Seasons, the Musica Franconia chorus enunciate the original English text perfectly well. Two native English-speaking vocal soloists were called in for the festival: countertenor Tim Mead and a longtime exemplar of baroque singing practice, soprano Emma Kirkby. Wolfgang Riedelbach directs the chorus and the period instrumental group La Banda.

Smith's music builds upon Handel's style. It is quite progressive for the end of the baroque era. The orchestration is colorful and illustrates the poet's seasonal imagery very well, with sprightly passage-work for woodwinds and horns. The two Christophorus CD's come out of my own collection of oratorio and opera on disc.