Category: Classical

‘Break forth into joy!’: Handel’s Messiah

Corrina

Saturday 10 December sees the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Wellington’s Tudor Consort perform Handel’s Messiah. Although now a fixture of the Advent and Christmas seasons, Messiah was first performed 280 years ago on Good Friday, 13 April 1742, in Dublin. Conceived as a Lenten piece, the second part of the oratorio offers a meditation on the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, before Part III’s message of redemption and victory over sin and death. However, Part I, with its Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah’s birth and the New Testament annunciation texts, is now firmly associated with Christmas.

Whether you’re attending Saturday’s performance, or if you make listening to Messiah an annual event at home, this is a great opportunity to explore some of the books about Handel’s life and music in our collection, alongside some CDs of Messiah.

Messiah : the composition and afterlife of Handel’s masterpiece / Keates, Jonathan
A detailed and authoritative study of the most frequently performed pieces of Western art music. Keates, a renowned biographer of Handel, explores the background of Messiah, the circumstances that led to its composition, the collaboration and conflicts between Handel and his librettist Charles Jennens, the social context of early performances, and how our understanding of spirituality in Messiah has changed between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.

Messiah Dublin, 1742 / Handel, George Frideric
The Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort, presents a stylish and expressive Messiah, reconstructing the version and performing forces that would have been found at the oratorio’s first performance in Dublin on 13 April 1742. The Dublin version of Messiah contains some music that is only rarely heard in performances today, offering a new perspective on Handel’s original conception of the oratorio.

Handel : the man and his music / Keates, Jonathan
This is a revised and updated version of Jonathan Keates’s ‘masterful’ biography of Handel that first appeared in 1985; the new edition reflects new research into Handel’s life and music that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s. The result is a scholarly yet readable account of Handel’s life, set out alongside commentary on his works.  Keates’ use of correspondence and other primary sources also helps to bring alive the world in which Handel lived, whether in Germany, Italy, or London.

Handel, who knew what he liked / Anderson, M. T
This humorous yet detailed biography of Handel is accessible and informative for children and enjoyable for adults as well. The author skillfully weaves together memorable incidents in Handel’s life to illustrate how the composer overcame difficulties in his childhood, and obstacles in his later professional life to realise his ambition and practice his art. M.T. Anderson and Kevin Hawkes make this book a witty and accessible introduction to Handel and the eighteenth century.

The Cambridge Companion to Handel
The collection of essays in the Cambridge Companion to Handel provides a fascinating guide to the life and work of the composer, as well as the social context in which he lived and worked. The chapters on Handel’s sacred music  and oratorios explore how Handel’s own faith and theology shaped and reflected the music he wrote. Donald Burrowes also discusses the performances of Handel’s oratorios during his lifetime, offering a tantalizing glimpse of the sometimes-chaotic premieres and revivals of Handel’s music.

Handel in London : a genius and his craft / Glover, Jane
Conductor and scholar Jane Glover charts the growth of Handel’s career in London, the city where he made his home. Glover’s very readable text examines Handel’s composing life, the challenges, rivalries, and feuds of the music business, and Handel’s interactions with other composers, singers, the nobility, and the public. Glover’s understanding of, and love for Handel’s music reverberate throughout the book.

Messiah / Handel, George Frideric
Emmanuelle Haïm directs the choir and orchestra of Le Concert d’Astrée and four outstanding soloists in this 2014 recording of Messiah. Haïm’s interpretation provides diverting contrasts to the approach taken by John Butt and the Dunedin Consort. The musicians of Le Concert d’Astrée’s orchestra play impeccably, and Haïm emphasises the dramatic, almost theatrical elements of Handel’s score. The vocal soloists are outstanding, delivering eloquent accounts of the most expressive moments throughout the oratorio.

Schumann and Psathas in Orchestra Wellington’s Circle of Friends

Mark

In this post Corrina, one of the librarians from our Te Awe Library, explores some of the music featuring in Saturday night’s Orchestra Wellington concert at the Michael Fowler Centre, focusing on John Psathas’s new concerto ‘Leviathan’, and Robert Schumann’s ‘Symphony No. 2 in C major’, and exploring some of the books and recordings in our collection that may enrich our readers’ responses to the music of these two remarkable composers.

John Psathas’s ‘Leviathan’ is the second of his works for orchestra and solo percussion to be featured in Orchestra Wellington’s 2022 season, following a performance of his All-Seeing Sky earlier this year.

Leviathan, which was commissioned by Tonhall Dusseldorf GmbH in 2020 as part of the Beethoven 250th Anniversary Year and the Beethoven Pastoral Project, received its world premiere in October 2021 with the Berlin Radio Symphony, soloist Alexej Gerassimez (also the dedicatee of ‘Leviathan’), and conductor Markus Poschner. You can read more about the conception behind ‘Leviathan’ – and its connections with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 – in Psathas’s own words here. Gerassimez will be the soloist at the New Zealand premiere of Leviathan here in Wellington.

We hold a variety of recordings and scores of Psathas’s works, including:


View from Olympus / Psathas, John
Three of Psathas’s best-known works – Omnifenix, View from Olympus, Three Psalms – performed by outstanding soloists Joshua Redman, Lance Philips, Pedro Carneiro, and Michael Houstoun, with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and conductor Marc Taddei.

Gyftiko : violin / Psathas, John
This is a beautifully produced Promethean Editions score of Psathas’s 2011 piece for solo violin Gyfitiko, commissioned by the Michael Hill International Violin Competition.

Sleeper : piano / Psathas, John
A minimalist yet explosive work for solo piano, Sleeper was composed for a recital by Stephen de Pledge at the 2008 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts.

Beethoven’s music also has a significant presence in Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major. Schumann began work on his second symphony, possibly motivated by hearing a performance of another work in C major, Schubert’s Symphony No. 9. Schumann’s ‘symphonic thoughts’ began to translate themselves into musical sketches, but it took almost a year for him to complete and orchestrate the Symphony, before its premiere in Leipzig’s Gewandhaus on 5 November 1846.

Berliner Philharmoniker Sir Simon Rattle / Schumann, Robert

The Symphony includes allusions to other composers, especially Beethoven and J. S. Bach. Following the quiet fanfare that opens the Symphony, Schumann writes Bach’s name into the music (using the notes BACH or B-flat, A, C, B-natural). Later, in the Symphony’s fourth and final movement, Schumann introduces a new – but somehow familiar melody – halfway through: a quotation of the final song in Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). In Beethoven’s song, this music sets the words:
‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder / Accept, then, these songs
Die ich dir, Geliebte, sang / I sang for you, beloved.

Such ciphers and hidden messages are a recurring feature in Schumann’s music, and this was not the first time Schumann had made a musical connection with An die ferne Geliebte in one of his own pieces: his op. 17 Fantasie for solo piano also contains a fleeting reference to Beethoven’s song cycle. Such subtle allusions to the music of Schumann’s composer-heroes formed a fundamental role in the realisation of his aesthetic and creative ideals.

Schumann : the faces and the masks / Chernaik, Judith
This 2018 biography of Schumann by one of the leading contemporary Schumann scholars illustrates with enticing detail the links between Schumann’s music and his literary interests that helped him to realise his ambition to be a ‘poet of tones’. Cherniak also explores in compelling detail Schumann’s relationship with Clara Wieck, the outstanding pianist who would become his wife, his interactions with other composers, and his responses to the musical events of the day. Cherniak’s command of her subject and her accessible writing style make this a very readable study of Robert Schumann.

Schumann / Schumann, Robert
This 2014 recording on the Naïve label offers three works by Schumann, his Abegg Variations, op. 1, his Kinderszenen, op 15, and the Fantasie, Op. 17 that includes an illusion to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. Lisa de La Salle’s interpretation of these early piano pieces by Schumann offers performances that are idiomatic and idiosyncratic. In her performance, de la Salle’s approach to Schumann’s articulation emphasises the eccentric humour of Schumann’s music in ways that other pianists have smoothed over. Reactions to this recording have differed wildly, but de La Salle illustrates the complexities of Schumann’s personality and aesthetics in a thought-provoking style.

Robert Schumann : herald of a “new poetic age” / Daverio, John
Exploring Schumann’s early desire to be a writer, then his quest to become a virtuoso pianist, and finally his pursuit of composition and music criticism, Daverio’s study blends biography with analysis of a variety of representative musical works. In particular, Daverio offers a compelling and readable portrait of a composer and writer who sought to realise the poetic spirit of Romanticism in mid-nineteenth-century music.

The symphonies / Schumann, Robert
All four of Schumann’s complete symphonies – including the 1851 version of his Symphony No. 4 – with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin provide a lively portrait of the composer as a symphonist. The smaller forces instrumental of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe sound crisp and sprightly throughout and lend this music a clarity that may initially seem unsettling when we are more accustomed to performances by full-sized symphony orchestras. Nézet-Séguin’s approach is energetic, his tempos sometimes breathlessly swift, but the orchestra’s ability and artistry are more than equal to their conductor’s demands in this 2012 recording.