Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mendelssohn: Elijah

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

As this month begins, lyric theater programming continues in Lenten mode, focusing on religious choral music within the Judeo-Christian tradition. On the Third Sunday of Lent I turn to that war horse of the oratorio repertoire, Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah (1846).

The English had cultivated the art of choral singing since the Middle Ages. They took to the musical artform of oratorio with a passion. Along with Handel's great works in that line the English enshrined Mendelssohn's Elijah, which was written for performance at the Birmingham Festival of choral music in 1846. Victorian audiences were in raptures over it and it immediately entered the repertoire. (Actually, Mendelssohn first conceived it as far back as 1836 in German language.)

Way back on Sunday, April 19, 1987 I presented Elijah on EMI/Angel LPs, as recorded at Kingsway Hall, London in 1968. Then on Sunday, April 7, 1996 came the Robert Shaw recording made in Symphony Hall, Atlanta in 1994. The famed American choral director led the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (a Telarc CD release). Both recordings featured some of the most distinguished singing voices available in the second half of the twentieth century. The older EMI recording has mezzo Janet Baker, tenor Nicolai Gedda and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos directs the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus and the Wandsworth School Boys' Choir. That vintage 1968 recording was reissued on two compact discs in 1995 through EMI Classics.