Is Messiah the world’s most durable choral work? Performed constantly since its first appearance in 1742, Handel’s great masterpiece has undergone all manner of surgery on the operating tables of musical interpretation. Choirs of thousands can sing it, or a mere seven people; it’s been heavily re-orchestrated, re-ordered, transposed, choreographed and even staged as an opera. Yet through all this it has survived, as bold and brilliant as ever.
Numerous editions have appeared since that first performance in Dublin, and today we have a new one to add, one that makes no claims to be “authentic” and one that a British audience has never heard before. Too Hot to Handel: the Gospel Messiah is about to break down musical barriers at the Royal Albert Hall in a riot of rhythm and colour.
“It’s all about the groove,” says conductor Marin Alsop, an international star who knows more than most about breaking down barriers. She has been at the top of her game for years now, famous as the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, known worldwide for the quality of her musical mind and for her fight for a level gender playing field, actively promoting female conductors, composers and performers.
She’s also deeply cool. “I had a swing band for 20 years,” she says, during a break in rehearsals for Penderecki’s “bloody difficult” Black Mask in Poland. “All those years playing in jazz clubs served me well. It taught me to relax and feel the groove. I’m having to remind myself of that right now, dealing with this big opera and some understandably nervous performers.”
There probably won’t be too many nerves on display at the Albert Hall when the Gospel Messiah shimmies on stage on 7th December. What the audience can expect instead are high-octane arias and choruses infused with jazz, gospel, R&B, soul and pop – music that will probably have hundreds dancing in the aisles and singing along, for this is no ordinary Messiah.
It all began 30 years ago, when Alsop had an idea. “I had friends who said – unfairly, I thought – that Messiah was boring. ‘Can’t you liven it up?’ they said. Now, I had long thought that Baroque music had a natural swing. I was working with arrangers Bob Christianson and Gary Anderson at the time and took them out for a drink to twist their arms into giving Messiah a new treatment. They thought I was crazy, but I had taken along the full score and after their initial shock they agreed to take a look.”
It wasn’t long before the arrangers saw the potential. For example, they could see the Hallelujah Chorus was a natural, rousing gospel number and imagined “All we like sheep” slipping into a shuffle. “They could see that pretty much everything in the piece could swing,” she says. Nevertheless, Alsop was keen to preserve the DNA, structure and integrity of the piece, and so despite the reworkings, the Gospel Messiah remains recognisably true to the original, with only a few cuts (which in any case are common in nearly all “straight” performances).
Where an audience will notice most change will probably be in the arias, in which soloists are given more license than the chorus. It’s traditional in gospel singing for soloists to improvise and embellish – something that is anyway very much in the spirit of Baroque performance, where soloists are expected to decorate and embellish da capo arias.
With her Messiah, Alsop has achieved her ambition to gather two worlds together in an act of inclusion. In her words: “Bringing the history of Black music to meet Handel.” Soon after its New York premiere it became a hugely popular seasonal fixture at venues throughout the US; the only mystery is why it has taken so long to come to London.
“I wanted to mark the 30th anniversary, and the Royal Albert Hall is a very special place for me, so it seemed a good idea to try to stage it here,” says Alsop, who said she found an enthusiastic reception for her project when she began discussions with the BBC Concert Orchestra, which on the night will be augmented with five saxophones, two keyboards, a Hammond organ and hot rhythm section.
The mighty choruses will be sung by the BBC Symphony Chorus and London Adventist Chorale in a performance that also features soloists tenor Zwakele Tshabalala and soprano and soul singer Vanessa Haynes. “I had worked with Zwakele before, when I conducted Beethoven’s Ninth. He’s really exciting,” says Alsop. “We got together with Vanessa in London in October and had a ball running through their numbers.”
Alsop learned her craft under the great Leonard Bernstein, a musician equally at home in symphonies, jazz and stage music. His openness to all genres is a quality that Alsop has embraced – a quality clearly evident in her Messiah. But with such an easy, almost improvisatory approach, is there a role for a conductor? “I set the groove, govern the pacing and make sure the architecture stays in place,” she says. “It’s one of the most fun things I do.”
That fun is definitely infectious. Neil Ferris, director of the BBC Symphony Chorus, bubbles with excitement. “It is such joyful music and everybody is so buoyant in every rehearsal. The energy is great. We are treating it as a learning project with the most exciting and glorious outcome.
“We’ve had the privilege of having Ken Burton [conductor of the London Adventist Chorale – LAC] take a majority of the rehearsals. He’s been brilliant in giving us the confidence to be idiomatic in all kinds of ways – the right colours in the sound, the freedom of expression and the freedom to move. I think it’s also important to say that we have talked about context too – where the tradition comes from – and greater understanding brings an easier connection to feeling the music from your heart. Members of LAC have been coming to our rehearsals – this is very much a side-by-side project and we have learned a lot from them – and we’ll be mixed together in the performance, too.”
They will make an impressive wall of sound, and will undoubtedly be nimbler than the 2,000 singers who gathered in the Crystal Palace in 1857 to belt their way through Handel’s depiction of the life of Christ, shouting over 500 instrumentalists in the orchestra. What a din that must have been. It’s just one example of the many different approaches taken to Messiah over the centuries, with a return to more Handelian proportions in the late 20th century; John Butt’s Dunedin Consort taking it to the absolute minimum with just seven performers singing both the choruses and the solos.
Alsop points out that her colleagues’ re-orchestration is only one in a long line of reworkings, most notably by Mozart, who added parts for trombones, horns, flutes and clarinets. She admits that perhaps Messiah is easier to pep up because it is a familiar piece, “part of the fabric of our society”, even to those who don’t claim to listen to much classical music. Israel in Egypt or Jephtha would be a much harder task. But look out, Alsop says: “Bach might just be my next victim.”
Marin Alsop conducts Gospel Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall on 7th December.
