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.
With a concert of Christmas music next month before its annual Messiah in the Usher Hall, the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union is a busy choir over the coming weeks. The headline work in this concert was Brahms’ German Requiem, but it was preceded by two pieces that spoke of a venerable 166-year-old institution far from content to rest on its laurels (and that perennially popular New Year event).
The first half began with a nod to the current season of Remembrance with Charles Villiers Stanford’s dramatic anthem For lo, I raise up, setting Old Testament verses from Habakkuk. Employing soprano and tenor soloists from within the ranks, it was conducted by the ERCU’s current conducting fellow, Fraser David Macdonald, a master’s student at the University of Edinburgh who later took his place with the tenors. The choir seemed much more comfortable with the hymn for peace that forms the second half of the work than the turbulent condemnation of the warmongers with which it opens, but it was an effective warm-up for everything that followed.
The fascinating gem of the programme – afforded a pre-concert introductory talk – was Ronald Center’s Dona Nobis Pacem. The chamber music of the self-taught 20th century Aberdeenshire composer has recently been explored on disc by pianist Christopher Guild and RSNO violinist Tamas Fejes with his quartet, but this post-WW2 call for reconciliation, setting Walt Whitman and 19th century Quaker politician John Bright alongside Biblical texts (borrowing much of that from Vaughan Williams) was a rare and bold challenge.
Center’s instrumental scoring for piano, organ, timpani and side drum makes for an arresting combination but it never overshadows the choir, although the piano part in particular is virtuosic and full of interest. It is a tricky sing, varying widely in style, but the “Choral” met the challenge head-on. Again from the ranks, tenor Timothy Coleman was the soloist in the Britten-esque Reconciliation second movement, while final year undergraduate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Caspian Plummer, made a fine case for the Bright-setting The Angel of Death as a stand-alone art song with Anna Michels’ piano accompaniment.
She and writer and broadcaster James Naughtie, who was a childhood pupil of Center, provided the introductory talk and genuine insight into the man and his music, before the chorus made the best case for its performance with their ensemble in the third movement Dirge for two veterans (the timpani rhythm close kin to the second movement of the Brahms), and in the moving Agnus Dei with which the work ends.
It set up the Requiem after the interval, which Naughtie had recalled hearing Center conduct for the Huntly Choral Society. As with the Dona Nobis Pacem, Michael Bawtree, ERCU chorus director of almost 20 years standing, was now on the podium and doing a very fine job of balancing his disparate forces, the women’s voices far out-numbering the men.
Plummer returned as baritone soloist, demonstrating good German diction and even tone across his range, while soprano Sophie Bysouth, also from the RCS, brought drama to the gospel opening of the fifth movement even if her intonation was a little uneven.
As with the concert’s opening work, the chorus was at its best in the more mellifluous music, while some of the accents in the score, notably in the opening movement and in the pealing lines at the end of Psalm 84’s “amiable tabernacles”, often needed more stress.
Another revelation of the evening was the effectiveness of Iain Farrington’s chamber reduction of the orchestral score, the keyboards and kettle-drums joined by four strings and three winds. The players’ hard work produced a remarkable sound from such a small team.
Soprano Emma Morwood’s I Know That My Redeemer Liveth and then If God Be For Us – in partnership with orchestra leader Greg Lawson’s violin – gave the singers of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union the ideal pathway to the climax of their annual New Year performance of Handel’s Messiah.
A very gentle sotto voce start to that deliciously-unfolding final Amen, with John Kitchen adding just the right level of underscore from the Usher Hall organ, was followed by a carefully calibrated crescendo for which all four soloists stepped to the front of the platform to add their contributions to the section-work. It was a gesture that seemed especially appropriate to this established occasion.
The choir was impressively responsive to the dynamic instructions of Chorus Director Michael Bawtree throughout, with moments like the unaccompanied “the iniquity of us all” at the end of Part 2’s sequence of choruses and the crisp His Yoke Is Easy that ended Part 1 especially good from the number of singers onstage. The 40 sopranos were as cohesive a unit as the dozen tenors and the whole choir’s diction was excellent from the start.
Of the soloists, alongside Morwood it was counter-tenor Alexander Chance who really shone. The clarity and precision of his singing, both quietly and at volume, and his immaculate articulation demonstrate a talent in full bloom. His ornamentations were never excessive and included a distinctive skill in small glissandi. Set pieces like He Was Despised at the start of Part 2 were magnificently measured.
The other two soloists inevitably suffered in the comparison. Tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas was a little thick-toned much of the time – he does seem to have a lighter voice available, but we rarely heard it. Bass Thomas Chenhall was too keen to force the pace and his lower notes lacked the heft his arias of darkness, warring nations and resurrecting trumpets require. Both had moments of uncertain intonation too.
With excellent continuo playing from cellist Niamh Molloy and David Gerrard at the harpsichord, and well-known faces throughout the Edinburgh Pro Musica Orchestra, this Messiah was on firm ground instrumentally and it was good to see the capital’s big hall well filled for a heritage event that now vies for attention in the city’s packed Hogmanay festival schedule.
A suggestion by former National Theatre boss Nicholas Hytner that arts funding be split, along sports lines, between professionals and amateurs, has sparked some debate, but the world of choral singing is one obvious sphere where it doesn’t stack up at all.
In Scotland, this year has been filled with concerts in which non-professional choirs gave world premieres of new music – something that would have been highly unusual not very long ago. Here was another, and with something of a tale of the times in its first performance coming to Edinburgh.
For the centenary of the Malvern Festival Chorus, which fell in 2019, Scottish composer Rory Boyle was asked to return to the choir he had previously directed for more than a decade to conduct a work of his choice in a celebration concert. He suggested to his successor, Jonathan Brown, that he compose something for the occasion and set four short texts in English, including words by Shakespeare and William Soutar, under the title Cantemus Igitur.
Alas the entire project was a casualty of the Covid pandemic, and the ten-minute piece remained unperformed until Saturday, when the Edinburgh Choral and its director Michael Bawtree, gave a very robust and full-voiced account of a piece that sounds well worth a place in the repertoire of many amateur choirs, and within the capabilities of many. If there are any difficulties with it securing further performances they are more likely to stem from the orchestral score, which is rhythmically complex, but was very securely performed here by freelance ensemble the Edinburgh Pro Musica Orchestra, led by Gina McCormack and with a few well-known faces in the ranks.
The other work on the programme was Joseph Haydn’s The Seasons, or rather the first half of it.
Having sung Autumn and Winter previously, this seasonal rendition of Spring and Summer featured three young soloists in soprano Ines Mayhew-Begg, tenor Seumas Begg and baritone Christian Loizou, with multi-tasking conductor Bawtree adding piano continuo to the orchestral accompaniment.
The final addition to the mix were choristers from Broughton High School’s Senior Chamber Choir, who had been working with the choir on the Haydn oratorio. The school is the home of the City of Edinburgh Music School, so the second half of the concert began with a short showcase of its work, unaccompanied singing followed by a four hands piano version of Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker, and then a jazz quartet playing a Fergus McCreadie arrangement of the Sinatra hit Summer Wind.
This pot-pourri was fine for a warm summer evening, but it might have been even better had it opened with the Boyle and the two Seasons had formed a more coherent second half, rather than having Spring and Summer opening and closing the programme. Using the recent Neil Jenkins text in English, which purports to return the cadences of the proto-Romantic poetry of the era, the choir was in fine voice, and tenor Seumas Begg particularly strong among the soloists, but by the time Summer’s Storm had disrupted the Pastoral labours, and man and beast had found rest, the earlier flowering of Nature’s bounty seemed a very long time ago.
TO the ears of those who have heard John Butt whisk the Dunedin Consort through Part One of Handel’s Messiah in well under an hour, Sir James MacMillan’s conducting debut of the work will not have sounded very pacey at all.
Truth to tell, the older members of Edinburgh Royal Choral Union – a choir that now boasts a healthy number of younger faces – have probably been asked to sing their annual New Year staple faster in some pre-pandemic performances. But if the unhurried approach MacMillan took denied his stated intention when he spoke to VoxCarnyx before the concert, that was probably for the best. What we heard was a very expressive, but never bombastic, Messiah where the story-telling took precedence over any darker liturgical message.
The choir can take a great deal of the credit for that, dispatching the trickier choruses with panache, only coming apart slightly in Part Two’s penultimate one, Let us break their bonds, but recovering quickly. Edinburgh’s Pro-Musica Orchestra were also a crucial factor in the light touch, fielding RSNO and Scottish Opera players alongside the freelances under the leadership of the Grit Orchestra’s Greg Lawson, and with ERCU director Michael Bawtree at the harpsichord and John Kitchen in a telling supporting role on the Usher Hall organ.
But the key ingredient for many in the completely filled hall on Monday afternoon was the quartet of young soloists, three of them – soprano Catriona Hewitson, mezzo Catherine Backhouse, and baritone Paul Grant – born in Edinburgh, and, alongside Royal Scottish Conservatoire-trained tenor Kieran White, all representatives of a new generation of highly-accomplished young voices.
For them, the old distinctions between big choral society Messiahs with hundreds of singers and historically-informed chamber choir recitals of the work are ancient history. What they have learned to do is give their own best performance of the oratorio, individually and collectively, in the most communicative way possible.
That is exactly what happened for the rapt audience in the capital from White’s gently-crooned “Comfort ye my people” onwards, Grant upping the ante with his sharply-enunciated shaking of all the nations, before Backhouse’s run of arias foretelling the birth of Christ, rich in her lower register with a delicious flourish at the end of Malachi’s “refiner’s fire”.
The narrative stepped up another notch with the shift to the Gospel texts and soprano Hewitson, who delivered the story as if she was announcing the good news for the very first time to an intimate circle of friends.
The flow of nice interpretative detail continued after the interval in Backhouse’s He Was Despised and the sequence of choruses from the same chapter of Isaiah. This choir demonstrates a dynamic range that is a rare skill among large amateur choruses, and MacMillan made full use of that.
Hewitson’s How beautiful are the feet was a little jewel amongst those choruses, and both she and Grant – on Why do the nations? and The trumpet shall sound – gave excellent accounts of the best known arias in Parts Two and Three.
With all the usual cuts to the full score, this was not an epic Messiah, and nor was it an especially “authentic” one, but it was a performance that everyone in the capacity house savoured from start to finish.
The conductors of Handel’s Messiah in Glasgow and Edinburgh on January 2 talk to Keith Bruce
As young musicians they came to Handel’s masterwork as a trumpet player and a flautist, but this year James MacMillan and Nicholas McGegan are on the podium for the New Year concerts of Messiah in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. For one it is a conducting debut, while the other has been part of the revolution in historically-informed performances of the work for more than four decades.
“I went to performances of it as a boy in Cumnock,” remembers MacMillan. “The local choral union was the Kyle Choral Union and they used to put on performances of Messiah and other oratorios. In fact one of my earliest trumpet memories is of playing third trumpet in a performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus in New Cumnock when I was 12 or 13 with the Kyle Choral Union. So they performed Messiah as well, with amateur players from around Ayrshire.”
McGegan recalls playing flute in the Prout orchestration of the work when he was at high school in Nottingham, and then being disappointed to find out that Handel had not written flute parts at all.
He was at the harpsichord when he played it in a seminal performance at Westminster Abbey in 1979, under the baton of Christopher Hogwood with his Academy of Ancient Music.
“It was about zero degrees and I was wearing fingerless Bob Cratchit gloves, and soprano Emma Kirkby had thermal underwear underneath her Laura Ashley dress.”
Understandably, however, McGegan recalls that era as a thrilling time when baroque repertoire was being re-thought.
“I ran intro Chris Hogwood at Cambridge in 1970. He was living at the top of a house owned by Sir Nicholas Shackleton, whose collection of wind instruments is now at Edinburgh University. I was loaned an 18th century flute and I went to the library and got hold of a treatise to learn how to play it, so I ended up playing second flute on the first recording of the Academy of Ancient Music.
“It was an exciting time; Trevor Pinnock was also around and a lot of this music was being done for the first time in many years. I was a slightly junior member of the team: Chris and Trevor and John Eliot Gardiner were all about ten years older than me. I played the harpsichord for them and, when necessary, the flute, and I was part of the project.”
It was in the USA that McGegan graduated to conducting the work, in the middle of the following decade.
“I remember directing my first Messiah absolutely to the day. It was December 1986 with the St Louis Symphony and the soprano, as she was then, was the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and it was her first Messiah too. She was a remarkable artist and in 91 I was able to record it with her.”
This year McGegan is once again at the helm of the RSNO and RSNO Chorus, with soloists soprano Mhairi Lawson, counter-tenor William Towers, tenor Jamie MacDougall and bass-baritone Stephen Loges. On the same afternoon, composer James MacMillan conducts the work for the first time for Edinburgh Royal Choral Union, where Catriona Hewitson, Catherine Backhouse, Kieran White and Paul Grant are the soloists.
“I sang bits of it later in my student years,” says MacMillan, “but a lot of the music I sang at school and university was earlier and I never sang the big choral union sort of pieces. So preparing for this performance there has been a lot that felt like seeing and hearing it for the first time.
“Some of the arias I really didn’t know and the breadth that Messiah travels over its three parts is incredible, not just from Christmas to the Crucifixion but as a piece of music drama. It really takes you on a journey with a whole range of emotions and moods. I can see now why it established itself as a deeply loved masterpiece.
“The hinterland now is the difference of approach from the big choral union tradition to what the early music world has brought to it, with smaller choirs and a tighter, more authentic instrumental approach.
“All that has to be taken on board and that might be the reason why I’ve never conducted it before, because there is a specialism and scholarship to Baroque and Pre-Baroque music that puts barriers up for the rest of us. My choral music was earlier, unaccompanied music, but most of the orchestral music I’ve conducted in the last 20-odd years or so is later, so coming to Messiah for the first time is a new thing for me.”
At the same time, MacMillan’s own composing life has moved from smaller, unaccompanied motets toward exactly the shape of work that Handel undertook after his operas.
“In recent times I’ve written a lot of big oratorios – the Christmas Oratorio, the St John Passion and the St Luke Passion – and I suppose they acknowledge the historical hinterland of Handel’s oratorios and Bach’s cantatas and passions – it’s all there in the mix. You grow up with this music and it leaves an indelible mark, sometimes subliminally, on a composer’s mind.”
The Covid pandemic had yet to silence choirs around the world when McGegan last conducted in Glasgow, where he thinks he counts as a local boy because of his years as Principal Guest Conductor at Scottish Opera, and the flat he still has in the city’s west end.
“New Year 2020 was the last time I was with the RSNO, just before the pandemic, so a lot of the same people will be playing in the orchestra and I hope some of the audience will be the same too.
“What I do is bring my own orchestra parts, with my bowings, the dynamics and articulation written in. I’ve worked with nearly all the soloists before, either in Messiah or other projects – people like Jamie MacDougall and I go way back, Will Towers and I have done opera together as well as Messiah – so it is like organising a dinner party for friends.
“I first came to Glasgow in 1991 and did The Magic Flute with Scottish Opera two years running. My father was an Edinburgh boy and I had a clutch of rather terrifying great aunts in Morningside, who were horrified that I wanted to work there!
“I had the best time at Scottish Opera, I always enjoyed it. I’ll be 73 next month, but I hope I’ve still got a few Figaros left in me. I did Figaro, Giovanni and Cosi at Scottish Opera and loved every second of it.”
MacMillan may be making his Messiah debut in Edinburgh next week, but he has other concerts of the work upcoming.
“This time is very experimental for me, but I get to do it again a couple of times in December next year in Australia. I have been asked to conduct it with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the week before my Christmas Oratorio. I think they thought if they were having me for one week they might as well have me for two!
“So it is something that will grow as I get to do it a few times. Keeping the pace lively is important and that is something we have all learned from the early music revolution. I’ve taken a couple of rehearsals now and I’ve been delighted how chorusmaster Michael Bawtree has trained the choir. It is very lithe and very light on its feet.
“I’ll bring a composer’s inside view to the process, and whether that’s valuable is for others to decide! I haven’t had a conducting lesson in my life, but I did have a consultation with Sir Colin Davis, who said that I should keep doing what I do, because there is something about a composer’s perspective that is unique. He thought that a contemporary composer’s view of the music of the past is valuable, and I was always encouraged by that.
“And the more I have lived with Messiah, I think there has to be a sense of through-composed travelling and of drama in the performance. I am wondering about whether some of the stopping and starting is really necessary and I might want to push on, so there’s not much hanging about between arias and choruses, and a non-stop feel to where the music is going.”
It is the non-stop sequence of performances of Messiah that McGegan identifies as one of its unique characteristics.
“It is one of the very few pieces I know that has been in more or less continuous performance since it was written. I know some musicologists would disagree, but I just see the basic story of the prophecies surrounding the birth of Christ, Christ’s life and passion and the resurrection, with the basic tenets of the religion without delving too deeply into the tricky stuff.
“It’s unusual for Handel because nearly all his oratorios have people singing roles. Jesus does not appear as a singing role and in some ways I think that makes it easier for everybody. It is not a portrait of Jesus, it is a portrait of the idea of the religion.
“Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, chose the texts very carefully to find the words that were easiest to sing and Handel sets those words very carefully. Handel is a master of writing for choirs, but the choruses are actually much more difficult than people who don’t sing realise. It is a masterpiece of very varied choral writing. That’s why people love it so.”
MacMillan also notes the way the work appeals as much to those of no faith as to the devout.
“When Messiah was first performed in the 1700s, I wonder what kind of mood there would have been in the hall. Would people want to applaud?
“How secular was it? How sacred was it? It seems to be a hybrid form that brought together the sacred and the secular in the world of music.”
The Edinburgh Royal Choral Union Messiah begins at noon in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on January 2. The RSNO and RSNO Chorus perform the work from 3pmon the same day at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
