Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Handel: Messiah

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This most famous of all oratorios is the obvious choice for broadcast on Christmas Day. Messiah has a long association with Christmas holiday musicmaking. Listening to it has surely become a holiday tradition. I have broadcast Messiah many times over three decades and more of Christmas seasons, using many different recordings, all of them in historically informed performance practice and most of them employing period instruments.

This Christmas you get to hear a very traditional recorded performance with a modern symphony orchestra. Sir Thomas Beecham recorded Messiah in early stereo sound in 1959 leading his own Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. The orchestration for modern instruments is officially attributed to Sir Eugene Goosens (1893-1962), an English conductor and composer who was a contemporary and colleague of Beecham. Beecham commissioned Goosens for the task, but he himself would certainly have had a hand in the alterations made to Handel's score. Even way back then Sir Thomas was aware of what historically informed performance practice would entail. He refers to the concept in the essay he wrote for the printed material that comes with the deluxe RCA Victor original issue of Messiah on four LPs. We have the original boxed set in our WWUH classical music record library.

Beecham wanted the public to hear everything that Handel had composed for Messiah, so on side eight of the last LP was a recorded appendix of numbers that traditionally had been cut from the score in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These additional tracks were retained in the 1992 BMG Classics reissue of the Beecham Messiah on three compact discs.

The four vocal soloists Beecham brought together for the studio tapings were all eminent opera singers of their day: soprano Jennifer Vyvyan, mezzo Monica Sinclair, tenor Jon Vickers and bass Giorgio Tozzi. If you're a purist in these matters, you may pooh-pooh the old school Beecham Messiah, but Beecham manages to bring out the passion inherent in Handel's inspired music, and he inspired all the singers and players in this recording to give it everything they've got. Beecham drives things forward with dramatic intensity. He gives us awesome massed climaxes. So I cry HALLELUYAH!!! For Beecham's dated yet marvelous interpretation.