Usher Hall, Edinburgh
There would be no meaningful victory in Handel’s Messiah without an enemy and the inspired selection of Biblical texts by the composer’s librettist, Charles Jennens, ensures that “gross darkness”, “the heathen”, and nations that “furiously rage” are part of the narrative. It was mezzo-soprano Rebecca Afonwy-Jones’s peerless enunciation of the word “smiters” in her aria He Was Despised that encapsulated the triumph of Christ’s sacrifice in this performance.
Taste in the sound of the vocal soloists is always subjective – and the perennial topic of conversation at the extended picnic interval of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union’s New Year concert – but Afonwy-Jones, who was a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist in 2011, now has an instrument that is rich-toned across its range and especially impressive in the lower alto voice.
If she was the star of this Messiah quartet, the young men on the platform – pure-toned Handel expert Samuel Jenkins and baritone Jerome Knox, who brought more operatic theatricality – were also very astute choices by conductor and ERCU chorus-master Michael Bawtree. Had soprano Emily Mitchell not been less than fully well, it would have been an impressive line-up. She made a very brave effort and gave her best, recovering from a wobbly How Beautiful Are The Feet to deliver I Know That My Redeemer Liveth well, but the last-minute decision to drop her If God Be For Us after Knox’s The Trumpet Shall Sound was clearly wise.
She had been less obviously below par in the Nativity sequence of Part One, which bowled along at a pace Bawtree, his choir and the Edinburgh Pro Musica Orchestra kept up throughout, in a reading that concentrated on the essence of the work, leaving out all the usually optional arias and superfluous repetitions.
While it is only too clear that “the Choral” is in desperate need of male voices, with only seven tenors named in the programme (as compared with two dozen altos), that was much less audibly obvious, with a clear emphasis on precision phrasing and articulation from the chorus. As early as And He Shall Purify it was apparent that this choir can sing quietly very well indeed, and the closing bars of All We Like Sheep were immaculately poised.
Bawtree never encouraged the singers to show their potential power at all, to the benefit of the balance, even in the Hallelujah Chorus, which was clearly what a few in the audience – bolstered, no doubt, by the lack of other billed attractions of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay – had specifically come to hear. On their feet as one to greet it at the conclusion of Part Two, they applauded it as enthusiastically as the imperious closing Amen, when the conductor finally allowed the choir some slack.
Keith Bruce
pictured: Mezzo Rebecca Afonwy- Jones