DownWithTyranny!

10pm ET UPDATE: We have Yevgeny Onegin audio files!

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Labels: Berlioz, Handel, Johann Strauss II, L'Enfance du Christ, Magic Flute, Mozart, Sunday Classics, Tchaikovsky, Verdi

HANDEL: Messiah: No. 2, Accompagnato, "Comfort ye"

Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

-- Isaiah 40:1-3

by Ken

Last night ( For Christmas Eve, we hark unto the openings of Berlioz's Childhood of Christ and Handel's Messiah") I took a stab at explaining how it came that, given this year's unusual three-day Christmas "arc," I had the idea of resurrecting a three-day musical post from Christmas 2011, and how it wasn't actually possible, as I'd first hoped, to simply paste the old posts into new blogfiles, but that that provided an opportunity to do various sorts of updating and expanding for the 2016 version.

One of the problems, with which I had to bore you but have to, just a little, is an infuriating technical incompatibility between our posts of bygone times and current ones, and in fact for the intended second and third parts of the sequence the problem has proved insurmountable -- tonight's continuation of last night's post had to be entirely typed from scratch, and I don't think tomorrow's planned resurrection of my composite performance of the whole of Part I of Messiah is going to be impossible for tomorrow's "third day" of Christmas ("Christmas observed").

As promised last night, when we listened to the opening tenor solos of Handel's Messiah and Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, including hearing both sung by the fondly remembered Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda, we're returning to the Messiah vocal opening (following the orchestral Overture, that is). Tonight, as I laid out the agenda in 2011, "I'm going to be resurrecting my account of how I first came to hear a tenor singing it singing directly and personally to me." And in addition:

As it happens, there's another musical excerpt, by coincidence or otherwise also written for tenor, which under the right circumstances can give me this same sensation of its composer reaching out -- through the agency of this singer -- and offering hopefulness. So I thought we would start out once again by hearing the two excerpts sung by the same tenor.

From the choral finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony:

Happily, happily, as his suns fly
across the heavens' splendid expanse,
run, brothers, your course,
joyfully, like a hero toward victory.

OUR HARD-WORKING TENOR WELL-WISHER TONIGHT IS --

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Labels: Beethoven, Christmas, Handel, Jon Vickers, Messiah, Sunday Classics

In the Sunday Classics era, Christmastime provided a bountiful musical opportunity. Since 2016 brings us a "three-day Christmas" -- Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Christmas holiday celebrated -- I thought I would dip back to 2011, when Sunday Classics had a three-day sequence that began with the openings of Berlioz's oratorio L'Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ) and Handel's eternal Messiah, then zoomed in on that opening tenor solo of Messiah, and finally expanded to encompass the whole of Part I, the only one of Messiah's three parts that is in fact Christmas-connected.

The original plan, of course, was just to paste the contents of the three original posts into new blogfiles. Alas, for all sorts of reasons that wasn't possible. Behind the scenes, for starters, all of the audio clips, every one of them had to be reformatted -- that is, once I figured out how to reformat them. For that matter, substantial portions of the texts of these posts had to be reformatted thanks to the Googlified software's fondness for eating up line breaks in older posts. Then, as noted below, a video clip had disappeared. On the bright side, my MIA-in-2011 CD copy of Colin Davis's first Messiah recording (the good one) has resurfaced, and will be pressed into heavy service on Monday. And on and on. The upshot is that, while I've tricked to stick as close as possible to the 2011 posts as possible, a fair amount of the 2016 versions is not only updated but brand new.

In the manger at this time Jesus had just been born,
but no wonder had yet made him known.
And already the powerful were trembling;
already the weak were hoping.
Everyone was waiting.

Now learn, Christians, what a monstrous crime
was suggested to the King of the Jews by terror.
And the celestial warning that in their humble stable
was sent to the parents of Jesus by the Lord.


Michel Sénéchal (t), Narrator; Orchestre des Concerts Colonne, Pierre Dervaux, cond. Adès, recorded 1959

Jean Giraudeau (t), Narrator; Paris Conservatory Orchestra, André Cluytens, cond. Pathé/Vox, recorded in the early '50s

Cesare Valletti (t), Narrator; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA, recorded Dec. 23-24, 1956

Anthony Rolfe Johnson (t), Narrator; English Chamber Orchestra, Philip Ledger, cond. ASV, recorded 1986

NOTE: These audio files were made, not for the 2011 post being revived here but for a later post. Since we're not returning to that later post anyway, I've folded these performances of the Opening Narration in here to replace a now-vanished video clip of the early numbers of L'Enfance du Christ. For more about the "new" clips of the Opening Narration, see below.

by Ken

Don't tell Bill O'Reilly, but I'm not a Christmas person. People don't come much more secular than me. But there are things about the Christmas season that I respond to, and Sunday Classics actually has several Christmas traditions. We do Tchaikovsky, and in particular the ballets -- a tradition carried forward with last week's first-ever Sunday Classics complete Nutcracker. [This was 2011, remember. The DWT complete Nutcracker became a mini-tradition itself for a couple of years.] And we do two altogether extraordinary works, which we've been prodding and poking at for years now: Handel's Messiah and Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ).

As it happens, both Messiah (following its overture) and L'Enfance kick off with tenor solos, each of which is for me one of the most meaningful, most powerful pieces of music I know. We have, in fact, dealt with both of them in past years, and we're going to be dealing with them again this week and next. But for tonight, I thought it might be fun to hear them sung by the same tenor.

Of course there wouldn't be much point if the tenor wasn't much good. But it occurred to me that we could accomplish this with a pretty good tenor indeed, Nicolai Gedda -- not one of my very favorite singers, but a good one, with a high degree of stylistic adaptability and and ability to sing effectively in more languages than any singer I can think of. (You'll notice that in "Comfort ye," for the phrase we normally hear as "saith your God," he carefully and precisely sings, each time, "sayeth two syllables] your God.") I don't know whether it qualifies as irony that for this quintessentially English and quintessentially French music, we're turning -- where else? -- to a Swede. These are both highly accomplished performances, which we're going to hear in the click-through.

2016 UPDATE: In 2011 there was actually a second week of "Christmas" posts, in which, having listened more closely to the opening tenor solo and then the whole of Part I of Messiah, which we're going to do again tomorrow and Monday, respectively, we proceeded to do the same with L'Enfance du Christ; this year, though, I'm afraid we're going no farther into L'Enfance than the Opening Narration. In the click-through -- new for 2016 -- I'm going to say a little about our opening assortment of performances of the Opening Narration of L'Enfance. 

We can proceed just as soon as you click through!


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Labels: Berlioz, Christmas, Handel, L'Enfance du Christ, Messiah, Sunday Classics

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Labels: Beethoven, Handel, Jon Vickers, Sunday Classics, Verdi

"I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal the wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds."


"Cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned"

Recitative
Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Aria
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Nicolai Gedda, tenor; Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded 1965

Jon Vickers, tenor; Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Sir Ernest MacMillan, cond. RCA, recorded c1953

Jon Vickers, tenor; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. RCA, recorded 1959

[in German] Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Heinz Mendes, cond. Live performance, Mar. 20, 1959

"Thou who art good and kind, rescue me from everlasting fire"

I groan as one who is accused;
guilt reddens my cheek;
Thy supplicant, Thy supplicant spare, O God.
Thou who absolved Mary,
and harkened to the thief,
and who hast given me hope,
and who hast given me hope.
My prayers are worthless,
but Thou who art good and kind,
rescue me from everlasting fire.
With Thy sheep give me a place,
and from the goats keep me separate,
placing me at Thy right hand.

Nicolai Gedda, tenor; Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded 1963-64

Jon Vickers, tenor; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded April 1970

Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; South German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Helmut Müller-Kray, cond. Live performance, Nov. 2, 1960

by Ken

Last Sunday I offered a post called "Garry Wills, contemplating Pope Francis and his critics, says there are 'two forms of Christianity now on offer' -- and it's up to Catholics to choose" which began with the quote from the pope that I've placed atop this post as well, since it is rather obviously the inspiration for today's pair of musical "snapshots" -- pieces that are both intensely personal to me, and that we've dwelled upon at some length in past posts.

Fresh from the challenge, in the first of these "snapshot" posts, "Rosina I and Rosina II," of finding a singer, namely Victoria de los Angeles, to put in the lead-off slot singing both Rossini's young Rosina (in The Barber of Seville) and Mozart's only slightly older but sadly way more mature Rosina (aka Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro), I was pleased to come up with our three tenors singing the similarly improbable combo of the opening vocal number of Handel's Messiah and the heart-rending "Ingemisco" from the "Dies Irae" of Verdi's Requiem. We've actually heard all of the above performances of "Comfort ye" and "Ev'ry valley" (and once again I couldn't resist including both Vickers recordings); I just needed to add the Gedda and Vickers "Ingemisco" performances.


OF COURSE WE'RE NOT GOING TO LET IT REST THERE!

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Labels: Fritz Wunderlich, Handel, Jon Vickers, Messiah, Sunday Classics, Verdi

Labels: 2014 gubernatorial races, Georgia, Handel, Jack Kingston, Michelle Nunn, Nathan Deal, Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, Senate 2014

Labels: Georgia, Handel, immigration, Jack Kingston, Michelle Nunn, Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, Senate 2014

Labels: Georgia, Handel, Jack Kingston, Michelle Nunn, Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, Senate 2014

Labels: Barrow, Georgia, Handel, Joe Donnelly, Paul Broun, Republican civil war, Roy Blunt, Saxby Chambliss, Senate 2014, teabaggers, Tom Price

As we're going to hear Kiri Te Kanawa close out Part I of Messiah, we have her here repeating her 1981 Royal Wedding triumph with Handel's "Let the bright seraphim" from Samson with James Levine conducting in 1985.

by Ken

As I tried to convey in last night's special Christmas Eve edition of Sunday Classics, it was through a sudden connection to the opening vocal number, the tenor accompagnato "Comfort ye, my people" (which we previewed, along with the Opening Narration of Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, Friday night), that I began to take Messiah personally. Today we're going to hear the whole of Part I, and by way of introduction I'm resurrecting something I wrote in the 2009 Sunday Classics Messiah post:

It's always pointed out, and rightly so, that Messiah is the oddball among Handel's oratorios. The others are unstaged dramatizations of highly dramatic Old Testament-based stories, which would probably have been staged if English censorship of the time didn't forbid stage representation of biblical material. Messiah not only isn't dramatic, it has no plot. It's just a collection of Bible snippets -- most uncharacteristically for Handel drawing on the New as well as the Old Testament. It has no "definitive" edition, with regard to exactly which numbers are included and which are assigned to which voice category, because Handel tinkered with both every time he performed the piece. This allows performers tremendous leeway in putting together a performing edition.

And of course the old-style performances with a massive chorus and orchestra have given way to more and more modest performing forces. That we have a better feel for how a Handelian phrase fits together is all to the good; otherwise there has been perhaps more loss than gain in the "authenticizing" of performances, which substitute book learning for musical understanding, which is especially unfortunate in the case of Messiah, which is one of the supreme musical tours through and tributes to the human spirit.

Only the first (and longest) of Messiah's three parts, which is all related to the birth of Christ, has a specific Christmas connection, but that's enough to make it inescapable Christmas fodder. Me, I listen to it all year round, and I'm not in the least religious. For me Messiah, for all its religious references, isn't particularly religious in content. When the soprano sings, "I know that my Redeemer liveth" (and we'll be hearing an especially intimate and personal performance), I understand by "Redeemer" something outside of our own selves that can give meaning -- and yes, even redemption -- to life.

FOR OUR COMPOSITE PERFORMANCE
OF PART I OF MESSIAH, CLICK HERE

Labels: Handel, Messiah, Sunday Classics

HANDEL: Messiah: No. 2. Accompagnato, "Comfort ye"
Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

-- Isaiah 40:1-3

No. 3. Air, "Every valley shall be exalted"
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

-- Isaiah 40:4

by Ken

In last night's preview, we heard the Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda sing both the first vocal numbers of Handel's Messiah (the acccompagnato "Comfort ye" and the air "Every Valley") and the little prologue to Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ." Tonight for Christmas Eve we're going to be focusing on that Handel recitative, "Comfort ye," and I'm going to be resurrecting my account of how I first came to hear a tenor singing it singing directly and personally to me.

As it happens, there's another musical excerpt, by coincidence or otherwise also written for tenor, which under the right circumstances can give me this same sensation of its composer reaching out -- through the agency of this singer -- and offering hopefulness. So I thought we would start out once again by hearing the two excerpts sung by the same tenor.


from the choral finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony:

Happily, as his suns fly
across the heavens' splendid expanse,
run, brothers, your course,
joyfully, like a hero toward victory.

WHO'S OUR TENOR? WE'VE ALSO GOT MORE OF
HANDEL'S "COMFORT YE" WHEN YOU CLICK HERE

Labels: Beethoven, Handel, Messiah, Sunday Classics

With the horn section of the Minnesota Orchestra -- Michael Gast, Brian Jensen, Ellen Dinwiddie Smith, and Michael Petruconis -- joining the Minneapolis-based Kenwood Symphony Orchestra and music director Yuri Ivan, we hear the opening of the first movement of Haydn's "Horn Signal" Symphony (No. 31).

by Ken

Our listening to Handel's Royal Fireworks Music and especially his Water Music last week has lodged the wonderful sound of horns in my head, as reflected in Friday night's flashback and last night's preview.

There are countless ways we could go once the subject is orchestral horns -- and I am thinking particularly of horns, plural, because while one horn is a precious gift to composers (perhaps someday we'll take a listen to memorable orchestral horn solos), a pair of horns (or, piling it on, two pairs of horns; as we learn in the video clip in the click-through, [WARNING: VIDEO-CLIP SPOILER AHEAD] there are four symphonies in which Haydn used two pairs of horns, Nos. 13, 31, 39, and 72) is a limitless treasure, a gift that keeps on giving. For the sake of sanity, we're going to focus today on one target: Franz Josef Haydn's Symphony No. 31, known as the Horn Signal for reasons that should be pretty obvious.

HAYDN: Symphony No. 31 in D (Horn Signal)
i. Allegro

Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Adam Fischer, cond. Nimbus/Brilliant, recorded Apr.-May 2001

Even in Haydn's vast and staggeringly remarkable output, this symphony is special. In the compacted CD version of his liner note for the Dorati-Decca recording of the complete Haydn symphonies, the great Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon writes that "for those familiar with the rest of Haydn's oeuvre,"

there is something particularly poignant about this "Hornsignal" Symphony, whose perfect construction and gay, light-hearted language, as yet untroubled with the accents of Sturm und Drang [although there are a heap of other Haydn symphonies that could bear the designation, it's most often applied to the six numbered 44-49 -- Ed.] represent in some indefinable way Haydn's farewell to youth, for in the next decades he was never quite able to recapture the deep-seated joy and innocence of this music.

TO ENJOY "THE DEEP-SEATED JOY AND
INNOCENCE OF THIS MUSIC," CLICK HERE

Labels: Handel, Haydn, Sunday Classics

The Minuet (our No. 6) from Handel's Water Music -- after a fashion

by Ken

Sometimes it's a fine line between Sunday Classics "flashbacks" and "previews." Last night we flashed back to last week, with one last hearing of the now-widely-disparaged Hamilton Harty suite from Handel's Water Music, though I did offer the suggestion/clue to pay attention to the horns.

The concept and makeup of this newfangled thing called an "orchestra" was still taking shape in Handel's time, and it would be hard to imagine a more dazzling demonstration of what horns could bring to the party than Handel provided. So tonight we're going to focus on four horn-happy movements from the Water Music.

Note that they're all from the first of the three suites that make up the Water Music, the one in the horn dream key of F major -- a reminder that the horns of Handel's time were still "natural" ones, which is to say the kind without the valves that allowed later horn players to produce any note, thus severely limiting the keys natural horns could play in.


TO HEAR OUR HORN-HAPPY WATER MUSIC
MOVEMENTS -- PLUS A BONUS -- CLICK HERE

Labels: Handel, Sunday Classics

Here's something different: the Air from the Water Music played by the Gateway Brass Quintet (Dan Smith and Robert Souza, trumpets; Cheryl Hoard, horn; Tom Vincent, trombone; Jeff Hoard, tuba), recorded at St. Anthony of Padua, St. Louis, Feb. 21, 2009. I didn't say good, mind you, just different.

by Ken

In last week's Royal Fireworks Music preview, Water Music preview, and main post devoted to both, I wound up with some musical leftovers. Having decided to give attention to the once-standard but now-widely-scorned suites arranged by Sir Hamilton Harty, I wound up with more samples than I used.

Basically we've got two "extra" versions of the Handel-Harty Water Music Suite. In the end, for an up-to-date stereo version, I didn't have to choose between the Szell/LSO recording I used and a rather different but equally lovely one by William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony, because it turned out that while I'd brought the jewel case for the CD that included the Steinberg performance home, I'd left the disc itself at the office. So we're going to hear that tonight.

Then, for a performance a bit more like the older-fashioned ones closer in spirit to Sir Hamilton's time, I produced my own digital rendering, a hybrid actually, from two LPs: the first four movements from Sir Malcolm Sargent's stereo recording with the Royal Philharmonic, which I had to complete, owing to intractable LP-surface problems, with two movements from Eugene Ormandy's stereo recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, not of the Harty suite but of his own similar one. And after all that I wound up not using my hybrid creation!

Partly this was because I chose not to attempt a grand defense of the Harty arrangement. Now this certainly isn't the only way I would want to hear the Water Music. In part this is because the arrangement locks in certain performance choices that are totally defensible but not necessarily something one wants to have made part of the basic performing text. In part too this is because much wonderful music is left out -- but then, nobody's figured out a really effective way to present all that music. The Harty suite makes for a lovely presentation of the music that's included, and I would certainly rather hear it this way than in most of what currently pass for fetishistically "authentic" performances that show substantially less understanding of the music. So this week we're going to hear those additional versions of the "arranged" suites.

Plus, we've got a bonus!


TO HEAR OUR HANDEL-HARTY WATER
MUSIC FLASHBACKS, CLICK HERE

Labels: Eugene Ormandy, Handel, Malcolm Sargent, Sunday Classics, William Steinberg

Fabio Biondi conducts (and plays his fiddle with) Norway's Stavanger Symphony -- they're currently making a debut tour of North America -- in a zippy performance of the Allegro and Andante from the Allegro-Andante-Allegro of the F major Suite of the Water Music -- from which Hamilton Harty derived both the opening Allegro and the Andante espressivo of his Water Music Suite.

by Ken

It's just about all fun this week, as we've been poking around Handel's glorious suites for outdoor royal festivities, starting with the Music for the Royal Fireworks Friday night and continuing with the Water Music last night.

Luckily for you, dear readers, preparing the audio files for the previews took so much out of me that I'm prepared to devote this post as much as possible to music.

As I noted last night, we've already done the "history" of the Fireworks Music in Friday's preview but we've left the Water Music for today. Just as the exact makeup of the total suite is subject to wildly different interpretation -- beyond the general understanding that there are 20-some movements grouped by key into suites in F major, D major, and G major -- there's a certain amount of disagreement about the history, starting with the connection between Handel and King George I, whom the composer had known in his native Germany when the future English king was still the Elector of Hanover. For example, you will find people saying that the new king had a grudge against the composer for abandoning him for England, and others who say that the elector had in effect sent Handel ahead to England as a sort of advance scout.

Wikipedia tells the simplest story:

The Water Music is a collection of orchestral movements, often considered three suites, composed by George Frideric Handel. It premiered on 17 July 1717 after King George I had requested a concert on the River Thames. The concert was performed by 50 musicians playing on a barge near the royal barge from which the King listened with close friends, including the Duchess of Bolton, the Duchess of Newcastle, the Countess of Godolphin, Madam Kilmarnock, and the Earl of Orkney. George I was said to have enjoyed the suites so much that he made the exhausted musicians play them three times over the course of the outing.

Well, that's part of the story. Clearly, there were multiple occasions for which music was written, which somehow eventually came together into a published version that almost raised more questions than it answered.

Handel and King George I on the Thames River for the premiere of the Water Music, July 17, 1717, as painted by Edouard Jean Conrad Hamman (1819–88).


TO TOUR HANDEL'S ROYAL FIREWORKS
MUSIC AND WATER MUSIC, CLICK HERE

Labels: Handel, Sunday Classics

This is the first part of Sir Hamilton Harty's own 1933 recording of the suite -- played, as we see, from original 78s (unfortunately with some outer-groove damage) -- he arranged from Handel's Water Music: the opening Allegro, the Air [beginning at 3:30, conclusion at 4:41], and the Bourrée [at 8:12]. We'll have the conclusion in the click-through.

by Ken

Last night we previewed Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, listening to the three middle movements (out of the total five). The Water Music is considerably more extended; the three suites that comprise it, normally identified by their key signature,are generally reckoned as totaling 20 movements 11 in the F major Suite, five in the D major, and four in the G major.

We're going to hear the whole thing tomorrow. For tonight's preview I thought we would follow the lead of Sir Hamilton Harty, first listening to his six-movement Water Music Suite and then tracking back to the original Handel movements he drew on.

I know we did the historical background of the Fireworks Music in last night's preview, and logically we should do the same for the Water Music tonight. The music clips for this post were a bitch, though, and I hate that historical-background stuff, so tonight let's just have music. I suppose we'll have to get to that stuff tomorrow. (You can always look it up yourself in Wikipedia. I've got a feeling that's what I'm going to wind up doing.)


TO PROCEED TO TONIGHT'S PREVIEW OF
HANDEL'S WATER MUSIC, CLICK HERE

Labels: Handel, Sunday Classics

"Rejoicing": Sir Andrew Davis conducts this "Prom at the Palace" (Buckingham, that is), for the Queen's Jubilee, 2002.

by Ken

Once upon a time Handel was known primarily as the composer of the oratorio Messiah and the two great suites of music written for outdoor royal occasions, the Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks. Tonight we're going to hear three consecutive movements from the Fireworks Music, the middle three: the tiny (not much more than a minute) "Bourrée"; the lovely slow movement alla siciliana, "Peace"; and the ensuing "Rejoicing."

Just to get the boring details out of the way, courtesy of Wikipedia (links and footnotes onsite):

The Music for the Royal Fireworks (HWV 351) is a wind band suite composed by George Frideric Handel in 1749 under contract of George II of Great Britain for the fireworks in London's Green Park on 27 April 1749. It was to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.

The performing musicians were in a specially-constructed building that had been designed by Servandoni, a theatre designer. The music provided a background for the royal fireworks that were designed by Thomas Desguliers, son of the cleric and scientist John Theophilus Desaguliers. However, the display was not as successful as the music itself: the enormous wooden building caught fire after the collapse of a bas relief of George II. However, the music had been performed publicly six days earlier, on 21 April 1749 when there was a full rehearsal of the music at Vauxhall Gardens. Over twelve thousand people, each paying 2/6[2], rushed for it, causing a three-hour traffic jam of carriages after the main route to the area south of the river was closed due to the collapse of the central arch of newly-built London Bridge.

FOR TONIGHT'S SAMPLING OF HANDEL'S
ROYAL FIREWORKS MUSIC, CLICK HERE

Labels: Handel, Sunday Classics

by Ken

Earlier this week I took sad note of the passing, at age 69, of the fine Welsh-born soprano Margaret Price. It occurred to me as I was thinking about her voice and caree that there aren't that many sopranos we've heard sing Handel's Messiah and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and quickly another occurred to me. (I'm sure there are many others. I stopped thinking about it.) Admiittedly in the case of Isolde it never happened in the opera house -- but that too is true for both singers!

I thought we'd just go ahead and listen to them both, though for fun we won't identify Soprano B until the click-through.

HANDEL: Messiah: Part III, Aria, "I know that my Redeemer liveth"

I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day
upon the earth. And tho' worms destroy
this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.

Job 19:25-26

I know that my Redeemer liveth.
For now is Christ risen from the dead,
the first fruits of them that sleep.

I Corinthians 15:20

Margaret Price, soprano; English Chamber Orchestra, Johannes Somary, cond. Vanguard, recorded July 1970
Who is "Soprano B"? She's identified in the click-through.

WHO IS SOPRANO B? TO HEAR BOTH SINGERS SING THE
LIEBESTOD, PLUS MORE MARGARET PRICE, CLICK HERE.

Labels: Handel, Margaret Price, Mozart, Richard Wagner, Sunday Classics

AND OUR MULTITASKING TENOR TONIGHT IS . . .


As far as I know, Vickers recorded both Messiah and the Beethoven Ninth Symphony twice, and in a moment we're going to hear both recordings of both our excerpts. For the record, the performances we just heard before the click-through were in both cases from the later recordings: the 1959 Messiah with Sir Thomas Beecham and the 1978 Beethoven Ninth with Lorin Maazel.


BUT FIRST, LET ME TRY TO EXPLAIN AGAIN HOW
"COMFORT YE" CAME TO MEAN SO MUCH TO ME

In a 2009 Christmas Day edition of Sunday Classics on Messiah (" 'For unto us a child is born' -- the Prince of Peace"), I wrote a bit about my history with the piece as a whole and in particular the opening tenor accompagnato (or accompanied recitative), "Comfort ye." I don't know how well it conveyed what I meant, but I doubt that I can do it better, so here's what I wrote back then:

I didn't always love Messiah. Like many people, I suspect, I used to think of it as a windy old bore. Gradually I came around, but a real turning point came one day when I was visiting my friend Richard, who had a large collection of 78s and a good turntable set up for playing them (if you've never heard 78s really well reproduced, you would probably be shocked at how much sound those old grooves can contain), and I got the crazy idea of listening to at least some of Malcolm Sargent's first recording of Messiah.

No sooner had we gotten through the Overture than I was stopped cold by the Northern Irish tenor James Johnston singing the first vocal number, the recitative "Comfort ye, my people." I don't know that anyone pays much attention to it. Certainly I never did. Usually you think of it as something you go through to get to the following tenor aria, "Ev'ry valley shall be exalted." Suddenly Johnson was singing, on behalf of his God, directly to me! "Comfort ye," indeed. And then he was singing to me, as Jerusalem, "that her warfare is abolished, that her iniquity is pardoned." Whoa! And I pretty well lost it.

Now anytime I have access to a decent performance of "Comfort ye," I am readily available for having my warfare abolished and my iniquity pardoned. And gradually I've found more and more of Messiah speaking directly and personally to me.

As I suggested before the click-through, I've had the same sort of experience with the big tenor solo from the finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, when I've encountered the right kind of performance while in the right sort of mood -- usually one where I'm in considerable need of bucking up.

With that background, let's turn the floor back to Jon Vickers.

HANDEL: Messiah: No. 2. Accompagnato, tenor, "Comfort ye, my people"; No. 3. Air, "Every valley shall be exalted"

Accompagnato
Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

-- Isaiah 40:1-3

Air
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

-- Isaiah 40:4

Jon Vickers, tenor; Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Sir Ernest MacMillan, cond. RCA/EMI, recorded c1952
Jon Vickers, tenor; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. (orch. Goossens). RCA/BMG, recorded 1959

from the finale of BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125

Happily, as his suns fly
across the heavens' splendid expanse,
run, brothers, your course,
joyfully, like a hero toward victory.

Jon Vickers, tenor; London Bach Choir, London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. Westminster/MCA/DG, recorded June 1962
Jon Vickers, tenor; Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, Cleveland Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 13-15, 1978

A SUNDAY CLASSICS CHRISTMAS EVE BONUS

To hear the complete performances of the finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony from which these extracts are extracted, click here.

IN TOMORROW'S CHRISTMAS DAY EDITION OF SUNDAY CLASSICS --

As I mentioned last night, we're going to have a composite performance of the whole of Part I of Messiah.


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

Labels: Beethoven, Handel, Messiah, Sunday Classics