Orchestra performs Handel’s 'Messiah'

To that end its choir had performed Messiah annually since 1893 (and still does), as well as some other sacred work (in my time, the Brahms Requiem and Mendelssohn’s Elijah) each spring, with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra. It hired big-time professional soloists from Chicago and kept a professional organist on its staff. Today it sells CDs recorded by its various choruses.

But the greatest draw for amateur vocalists like me was the church’s charismatic choir director, Freeman Burkhalter, who had earned advanced degrees in music from Northwestern and Columbia. Each Tuesday night some half-dozen of my Portland neighbors would pile into a car or two for the 16-mile trip to Berne, just to commune with Handel’s iconic Christmas oratorio and Burkhalter’s magnetic presence. Some of our fellow choristers drove as far as 40 miles for this sublime experience.

This weekly pilgrimage was an act of faith for some of them, but of course not for a Jew like me. When one of my Portland companions once asked, “How do you feel singing words you don’t believe?” I replied simply that I was there for the music, not the words. I tactfully neglected to mention that when they were singing, “He is the king of glory,” I was singing, “This whole thing’s a crazy story.” (Just kidding. But I was tempted.)

Full-blown spectacle

Handel’s original Messiah was written in 1742 for modest vocal and instrumental forces, with optional settings for many of the individual numbers. Only after Handel’s death was the work adapted for performance on a much larger scale, with giant orchestras and choirs. Although our Berne choir sang it without any orchestral accompaniment — just an organ and piano, as I recall — the effect was overpowering nevertheless.

So imagine Handel’s Messiah were performed not in rural Indiana by earnest amateurs like me but in a major city possessed of a world-class orchestra, a charismatic conductor, an abundance of professional voices, an affluent and sophisticated audience, the expertise of some of the world’s best music schools — all the resources necessary, within a few miles of the concert hall, to pull out all the stops and give Messiah the sort of treatment that Handel never imagined in his wildest dreams.

The result was the full-blown two-hour-and-forty-minute spectacle experienced by the Verizon Hall audience Friday night.

Assembled from scratch

The Philadelphia Orchestra stinted on nothing, including some sections I don’t believe I’ve ever heard before, even on recordings. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin embellished the evening with timpani, strategically placed trumpets, and of course the Kimmel Center’s Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ, largest concert organ in the United States. But for the most part, Yannick subordinated himself and his orchestra to that most beautiful of all instruments, the human voice, represented in this case by five magnificent soloists and an equally strong chorus.

In particular, the purity of voice that emerged from mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill was the sort of commodity I wished I could bottle and preserve. When the British bass Matthew Rose sang “All nations I’ll shake,” he put me in mind of the fellow standing next to me some nights in Berne, whose voice was so powerful that I wondered why I even bothered to open my mouth. Lacking an organized chorus since the demise of the Philadelphia Singers, choirmaster Jonathan Coopersmith assembled a chorus from scratch whose voices were notable as much for their sweetness as for their strength. (Full disclosure: Coopersmith is an acquaintance of long standing whose daughters studied piano with my wife.)

Notwithstanding the recent dismaying reports of continuing declines in attendance at the orchestra's concerts, Friday’s hall was full, and few in attendance could complain that they didn’t get their money’s worth. Under Yannick this is an orchestra that continues to push the envelope, to refuse to phone in the same old same old, to make the extra effort, even if it involves staying on stage almost until 11pm.

As for my relationship with Messiah, the appropriate text comes not from the Gospels but from T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” As I told my Indiana neighbors years ago, for me it’s the music, not the words.