Wednesday 20 December 2017

The Legacy of Kings

Yesterday, while driving the highway north, I listened to a favourite album which comes out every year during the weeks leading up to Christmas.  It's a 2-CD reissue anthology of Christmas carols recorded at the world-famous chapel of King's College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

The King's College Choir has led the famous Festival of Lessons and Carols service every year since 1928, and the service has been broadcast on the BBC (and in many countries around the world) -- every year since 1931.  These annual broadcasts draw audiences of untold millions of listeners.  The Choir has also made a number of recordings of their carol repertoire through the years, and the album I have at hand contains selections from several such recordings.

While the service of lessons and carols was created originally in Truro Cathedral in the 1880s, it can fairly be said that the annual King's broadcast has played a key role in popularizing the tradition of lessons and carols around the world.  In the process, these broadcasts have also circulated some wonderful music that had previously been known and heard only in England.

Listening to these selected numbers from various recordings all at once requires a slight degree of patience, as the dynamic level is apt to jump up or down from one track to the next.  Also, some of the pieces are more distantly recorded, so that the chapel's rich, resonant acoustic is more prominent.  Speaking of prominence, the chapel's magnificent organ is featured in many selections as well.

For North American listeners who have been brought up in churches such as the Anglican or United churches in Canada, some of these carols will be well known.  The recordings contain old friends found in the hymnals of many Christian denominations.  But the real treasure comes in the folk carols, some of which are widely known in Britain but far less familiar on this side of the ocean.

I've spent many delightful Christmas hours singing and playing traditional English carols, and yet this album still provided me with surprises and new carols to augment my Christmas traditions.

Throughout these two well-filled discs, the excellence of singing -- whether accompanied or a cappella -- can be taken for granted.  Not for nothing is the King's College Choir known as one of the leading choral bodies in the Church of England.  Likewise the excellence of the organ playing, in those numbers where it is used.

The second disc of the album concludes with a lovely performance of the Fantasia on Christmas Carols by Ralph Vaughan Williams.  This work, for baritone and choir, includes several wonderful folk carols with passing references to other tunes.  It's heard here in the reduced version for strings and organ, and is as beautifully played and sung as all the other music.

If you're not familiar with the rich treasures of traditional English Christmas music, I'd urge you to hunt up a recording or two of this kind, or search online for performances from English choirs -- whether from King's or some other cathedral or college chapel.

And prepare to be enchanted.

Tuesday 19 December 2017

Will the Real "Messiah" Please Stand Up?

This is another one of those occasional posts where I share some information about less-known aspects of very well-known works -- in this case, the oratorio Messiah, by Handel.  The information I'm going to be sharing here is well known to most musicians, but perhaps less so to the general public, so feel free to read skippingly or to skip reading freely.  

With Christmas time close upon us, the annual Messiah performances are also well underway in cities and towns, churches and concert halls, all over the globe. It's ironic that we've become so attached to the idea of Messiah at Christmas, since Handel always regarded it as a work for the Easter season, and regularly performed it at that time of year.  Messiah must surely be the most widely known and most often performed major choral-orchestral work ever composed.  But right in that blanket statement is a huge catch.  Which Messiah?

The most unsimple fact is that there is no definitive or "final" version of Messiah from the composer's hand.  Handel was an impresario and performer as well as a composer, and he constantly revised various numbers in Messiah, as well as reviving former versions of some numbers.  One aria actually exists in no less than six alternative versions.  Not only are there different versions, but some solo numbers are transposed from one voice type to another, while an aria in one version becomes a duet or a  chorus, or a duet with chorus in another. Some solos were always performed by a castrato or a counter-tenor, while others were as regularly assigned to a female soprano or alto. 

Every one of these alternative versions was created by Handel to suit the resources, players, and singers, available to him for each of his numerous performances.  They should never be taken as signs that the composer was dissatisfied with his former thoughts on the subject.  Indeed, Handel was such a monster of ego that it's doubtful whether he could ever have felt that his work was unsatisfactory, or anything less than perfect.

When I was growing up, we all knew what the correct text of Messiah was.  We were completely habituated to the order of the numbers, the voice types assigned to each, and all the rest.  Life was simple in those earlier days.

But the rapidly accelerating pace of musicological research re-shaped our thinking over the next few decades.  We now know that the version which we once thought of as definitive was assembled by the English editor Ebenezer Prout in 1902, while preparing his performing materials and vocal score for the Novello publishing house.  It was he who was responsible for selecting certain versions and rejecting others.

As the research and the authentic performance movement alike gained momentum, the whole question of "Which Messiah?" became harder and harder to answer.  New recordings and concerts alike introduced us to some of the alternative versions.  Orchestral sound became leaner, and choirs in many cases became smaller.  Some recordings endeavoured to reproduce the actual conditions of certain Handel-led performances which were clearly documented at the time.

Even with all this activity, it would take a considerable time to listen through enough recordings to let you hear all the alternatives that exist.  I must admit that I have not done so.  Charles Mackerras's landmark recorded version in the 1960s incorporated some of the alternatives as an appendix.  If anyone has gone the whole hog of recording every single possible version, I have yet to hear of it. There's a definite opening there for any ambitious recording company willing to take a flyer on a unique project.

At any rate, here are a few thoughts on some of the alternatives which I have heard. 

"But who may abide" was originally written as a recitative for bass, then rewritten as a singularly dramatic aria for counter-tenor (and there's another version of that aria, in a different key, for soprano as well).  While we usually hear the counter-tenor aria version, the old practice of having that version sung by a bass is simply bad tradition. That tradition arose out of Prout's conviction that an aria following a recitative ought, as a matter of course, to be for the same voice type. Handel had no such limitations in his mind.
 
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion" exists in an alternate form, still as a soprano aria, but in 12/8 time with a delightful bouncing dance rhythm which I quite enjoy. This is one alternative that certainly deserves to be heard more often.

"He shall feed his flock" is familiar as an alto-soprano duet, but was actually originally a soprano aria throughout.  For me, the contrast of voices and the simple but inspired key change between them works much better.

The original version of "How beautiful are the feet" doesn't appeal to me as much.  In place of a simple and moving soprano aria, there's a shortened duet for soprano and alto leading into a chorus which keeps on repeating the words "glad tidings" and "break forth into joy" ad infinitum and ad nauseam.  That was Handel's original setting of the text.  In this case, his later thoughts of a soprano aria (also transposed for alto on another occasion) are a great improvement.

The bass aria, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?," is another dramatic showpiece.  The alternative version in which the line about the kings of the earth is delivered in a brief recitative is fine in its way, but it's a pity to lose the additional florid coloratura in the second half of the full-length aria.

As a final comment on this wonderful music, it always seems a shame to me that so many performances are given with "traditional" cuts. Prout's score indicates them with a note: "This aria is generally omitted." 
 
Handel, though, did not cut, even though he busily rewrote.  After many years of listening to recordings which include a complete sequence of movements, it always comes as a rude awakening to me when a live performance leaps over the middle chunk of Part 2, with its three splendid choral movements.  Even sadder, to my taste, is the regular omission of the soprano aria in Part 3, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" which is one of the greatest inspirations of the entire oratorio for the sheer beauty of the vocal writing.