When historically informed performance for Baroque repertoire feels almost obligatory these days, it feels like a real and rare triumph of heart over head that one of the most famous Baroque works of all, Handel’s Messiah, remains as firm a fixture of the Christmas concert season as turkey is to Christmas lunch despite its 1742 Dublin premiere having been at Eastertide, and two thirds of its libretto being devoted to the Easter story and beyond. But there it is, you’d have to be a scrooge not to just roll with it, and certainly there was nothing scrooge-like about the crowd who packed into London’s Barbican the week before Christmas to hear what Laurence Cummings and the Academy of Ancient Music had to say with it. This was a palpably festive-spirited full house, with a further sense of occasion provided by this being the AAM’s first capacity-crowd Messiah in London since the pandemic.
Forces-wise, there were no surprises, Cummings leading from his harpsichord a comparatively modest complement of 22 instrumentalists (gut strings, Baroque oboes, natural brass, theorbo, organ and timpani), 18 chorus members and four soloists, a direct emulation of the 1742 premiere’s reported 40-ish musicians. More of a surprise was their opening “Sinfony” Passiontide-leaning in its steadily dignified legato flow – less a theatrical overture than a quietly anticipatory processional feeling its way through the world’s darkness. Yet had any audience members thus braced themselves for an unexpectedly downbeat evening, those fears would have quickly been dispelled by tenor Nick Pritchard’s “Comfort ye”. Light, bright and warmly radiant, sung with the score down at his side so as to take in the whole hall with his gaze, this was an unusually and movingly serene and conviction-filled proclamation of the Advent prophecies; and in fact one of the evening’s joys, going forwards, was how seldom all four soloists had their eyes in their scores, and how little the audience needed the libretto in hand, so clear was the sung diction from everyone.
On balance, the musicians sounded slightly more dramatically invested in the Passiontide emotions than the Christmastide ones, “And the glory of the Lord” in particular sounding more committed than genuinely jubilant. That said, the shepherds’ scene more than hit the mark: the “pastoral symphony” transformed into almost a barn dance with its clipped, one-to-a-bar rural spring; soprano Anna Devin sounding very much like an angel herself with her smiling, silvery serenity; the trumpeters suddenly popping out from the rear stage’s shutters, much to the audience’s audible amusement, for the heavenly hosts’ “Glory to God” chorus.
Other memorable moments? The fabulous leer the choir brought to its Good Friday taunt, “He trusted in God that he deliver him…”; trumpeter David Blackadder’s soaring lyricism in “The trumpet shall sound”, sung with nimble energy by bass Cody Quattlebaum (now settled, when at the start he’d had moments both of slightly too-bullish power, and not enough projection); the virtuosic storm whipped up by the orchestra for “Why do the nations”, hurling themselves at their instruments with wood-smacking energy; yet more poised, silvery profundity and exquisite upper-register control from Devin in “I know that my redeemer liveth”; a brightly, crisply resplendent Hallelujah Chorus for which the overwhelming majority of the audience immediately stood – a voluntary communal holding to a centuries-old tradition which felt especially moving in the context of our increasingly socially fragmented, heritage-rejecting era; throughout, Cummings’ easy switches between directing from his harpsichord via lively body motions, and away from it via expressive balletic hand gestures, with the odd delicious little straight-backed mini sauté leap at high-impact phrase ends.
Their concluding, deftly grown Amen hit home not just for its warm, richly hall-filling majesty, but for the climactic strength of the evening’s overarching emotional mood music: serenity – dissipated instantly upon the fading of the last note, by cheers and a standing ovation.
