Handel: Messiah 1754

Abandoned children and destitute orphans helped make Messiah one of the most popular of all sacred choral works. Handel’s oratorio, first performed in Dublin in 1742, left its early London audiences stone cold. The work finally took off in England’s capital in 1750, when the composer directed a performance in the new chapel of the Foundling Hospital and set the trend for Messiah as an annual fixture in the charitable institution’s fundraising calendar. It soon reached Italy, parts of Germany and the then-British province of New York to become international property long before the Steam Age. Conductor Hervé Niquet has had a long relationship with the piece. “I sang Messiah as a treble 55 years ago, and the piece has never left me since,” he tells Apple Music. Niquet’s recording revisits the 1754 Foundling performance, the first for which precise details of Handel’s instrumentation and the considerable size of his orchestra and chorus have survived. “The 1754 version uses five soloists instead of four and has more of a sacred-opera feel,” says Niquet. The album, made shortly before Christmas 2016, gains in depth and presence of sound via a remastering in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos that brings the listener even more inside the vocal and orchestral textures and underlines the confessional urgency of the conductor’s interpretation. Messiah becomes a sacred opera in Niquet’s hands, propelled not least by the drama of Christ’s brutal humiliation in the work’s second part. His fine soloists, especially tenor Rupert Charlesworth and soprano Sandrine Piau, treat the prophecy of the Saviour’s coming and the narrative of Christ’s nativity, passion and resurrection with genuine empathy and breathe new life into the antique English of the King James Bible. There’s little room for reflection in this Messiah: the story is told at speed, as if being filed from the front line of the battle between good and evil. The “Lamb of God” is led to the slaughter by a mocking choral crowd, played with chilling commitment by the 27 voices of Le Concert Spirituel. Their motivation—and that of the performance as a whole—is driven by the weight of mankind’s destructive nature before being checked by the overwhelming force of God’s redeeming love, the latter signalled with triumphant joy in the “Hallelujah” chorus and by a divine performance of the oratorio’s final “Amen” fugue. “With their considerable experience in opera,” adds Niquet, “the entire Concert Spirituel team brings an overwhelming power to a story that has, for centuries, shaken humanity.”