I think that the lead story on the Messiah this year was the conductor, Matthew Halls. Not to be confused with the Matthew Halls whose wife, Dektha, plays such a role at Christmas -- oops, sorry -- vaudeville belongs in the Pops. Anyway, when this guy showed up a lot of the women pricked up their ears like bunny rabbits. I'm told authoritatively that he is "hot". He certainly seems to me to be a fine looking young man, and young he is -- 35 years old. I think that many of the ladies in the chorus may have reacted to him in much the same way that I did to Gisele Ben-Dor back in the day twenty years ago. But the guy is not just a heart-throb, he is a very impressive musician. The piano rehearsal and orchestra rehearsals had people saying that he was "channeling Leonard Bernstein and Robert Shaw". The tempos in the rehearsals were mostly extremely fast -- very challengingly so for the melismas, and in fact right on the edge of what a bass like me is capable of hanging onto. Not only that, but he was conducting phrasing of individual parts during the counterpart very effectively. All this was very exciting.
When it came to performance, however, he pulled back most of the very fast tempos in the first (Christmas) part to "pretty standard rapid", which may have produced a certain feeling of letdown. Some of us felt that the initial excitement was cooling a bit. I felt that way, but I must say that by the last performance I had warmed back up. My feeling was that after the tempos slowed down in the first part the performance became pretty standard (with some exceptions that I'll describe shortly). Very good, but mostly not exceptional. The Easter section, however, had a whole bunch of very expressive and unusual interpretations. For example, the slow sections of "Since by Man Came Death" are usually done pretty softly throughout. Halls' interpretation, which was totally different from anything I have ever heard, went from pianissimo to full forte in the Adam part -- and then back to pianissimo. Very, very dramatic. (It's a shame that when it's broadcast they will no doubt AGC these passages so that the only hint of the dynamics will be the extent of strain in our voices, but that's the way the broadcasts work -- they need to be safe for elevators and noisy cars). And the tempos were extreme. "All We Like Sheep" was scary-fast (if you have to sing the melismas), and "Let us Break their Bonds" was as fast as I've ever heard it. I must digress to recount that Halls gave us a heck of a complement in the piano rehearsal about "Let us Break their Bonds": he said, "That was the most exciting performance of that work I've ever heard". Holey Moley!
Halls did a lot of other things that were unusual. He varied the tempos more than I've ever heard done in Baroque music. For example, he stretched out the tempo in the final notes of many of the sections, and in some of the performances (but not all) he accelerated the last "Hallelujah's" of the Hallelujah Chorus. Adding even more texture to the work was his use of dramatic phrasing and accented musical motifs in the orchestra. For example, in "Refiners Fire" the violins suddenly and dramatically fling out the occasional jagged phrase -- perhaps like a jet of flame bursting from a fire. There were many, many other things like this which contributed to the over-all sense of drama that Hall's conducting style brought.
I thought that the soloists were superb! Every one of them, in different ways, although as usual some opinions differ -- see the email thread quoted below. The tenor, Thomas Cooley, the leadoff batter more or less, sang beautifully with very effective contrasts in dynamics. His ornamentation was extremely elaborate and tasteful -- the best ornamentation I've heard a tenor do in Messiah since Carl Dent in '91 and '97. As a bass, I was in absolute awe of bass-baritone Jeremy Galyon. A powerful and beautiful voice across the extreme range of the Messiah role, tremendous facility in the melismas -- and his low E at the end of "Why do the Nations" was incredible. Actually, I've never heard a bass successfully take that note down the octave before. Where does Auralie Desmarais keep finding these incredible basses? The mezzo role was taken by counter tenor Jay Carter, and many people in the chorus were buzzing about what a great job he did. He had a warm tone and, like many countertenors, a simplicity and perhaps even innocence. In this he was a very interesting and unusual contrast to the soprano. We often have these hard-nosed mezzos who after hearing "Shame and Spitting" and "Refiners Fire" -- well, you probably wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alley. And then the contrast is often to a pure, sweet soprano sound. Well, in this case Carter's style was beautifully suited for lines like, "And gently lead those who are with young", but perhaps the "shame and spitting" and "refiners fire" would have been less appropriate to his style. He didn't do either of these arias -- the first was cut and the second done in the soprano version, which I've never heard before and quite liked. But the contrast in "And He Shall Feed His Flock" with the soprano was perhaps the opposite of what is more usual. Here the lower line was beautifully gentle and innocent -- and the soprano, with her more operatic style, sounded much more worldly. An unusual contrast, and I liked it.
This brings us to the soprano, Katherine Whyte, who certainly had the biggest soprano role I've heard in Messiah. Not only did she do the usual arias, she also got "But Who May Abide" and "Refiner's Fire", usually sung by alto or bass, and the seldom done and very beautiful, "If God be For Us". Whyte, who sang the Mozart Requiem with us recently, has a dramatic operatic style with a florid vibrato. This style, in my opinion, worked well with the generally dramatic interpretation by Halls of the entire work, and I liked her singing a lot. A couple of her ornaments were dramatic to the point of being on the edge of being uncontrolled, but I thought they stayed on the right side (although I think some people disagreed with me on that and thought they were not appropriate). The two most notable were on the word "fire" in "Refiner's Fire" and "shout" in "Rejoice". In the latter it is quite common to sing an ornamental scale up to B-flat and back down -- which she did but added a flipped D at the top. Very impressive, and on that word I think that it "worked".
So how did the chorus do? For this I guess I'll quote some email chatter after the last performance:
Roger Cutler: IMHO -- and it really is humble, being restricted to whatever I hear from my particular corner of the stage -- that was a GONZO performance tonight. I know that I made less than my normal number of screw-up's, and the people near me did very few as well. Not only that -- at least around where I was -- we were TIGHT. We were really TOGETHER, whatever the circumstances. And I thought that the interpretations and phasings were really effective. Not to mention the melismas being ... tight. AND -- it's not often that an audience rises to its feet immediately and CHEERS. Sometimes they do that later, but the immediate thing is, in my view, an unpremeditated homage. That happened tonight.
I'm proud to be a part of that performance. Well, I'm proud to be a part of most of our performances, but for this one I'm extra proud. Downright sinfully proud.
Linda Richardson: I was in that audience last night. No HUMBLE to it. The chorus has every right to be proud of their performance. The malismas were very light in all voices. Dynamics were great, too. Wish I could have been a part of it. I thoroughly enjoyed ALL the chorus parts. If the soloists had been better, it would have been truly a performance of a lifetime.
In fact, there was a few seconds of anticipation that could be felt in the audience, like everyone was waiting with bated breath those few seconds before the conductor gave his release. Awesome!!!
Sarah Clark: I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to sing this Messiah. It was amazing. We were tight. We were together. My son said this was the best he has ever heard the chorus sound. He liked everything about the performance (soloists, orchestra and conductor) but said the chorus was the real star attraction. His friend called the performance "exhilarating". I did tell my son that Matthew Halls had a lot to do with it! He was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful taskmaster. (Is that too many wonderfuls? I don't know, but I am in awe of his gifts.)