MUSIC

St George’s Bristol (Sun 18 Dec)

Anyone nervous about the one-to-a-part line-up promised for La Nuova Musica’s ‘Messiah’ must have been intrigued (not to say a tad reassured?) to find 14 chairs lined up behind the small but perfectly balanced orchestra. In the event the four advertised soloists were drawn from a bigger ‘choral pool’ – though it being Christmas, director David Bates had a solution for those wanting just the white or brown meat of minimal versus larger forces: some of the choruses were reconfigured to include solo elements, allowing an intriguing extra dimension when it came to illuminating the text. And interpreting the text as part-story, part-theological-narrative is what fired a performance that took nothing for granted and re-examined every bar, phrase and gesture from scratch. Bates’s pacing, the way in which numbers flowed one into another – or didn’t – was gripping, his colouring of the words vivid, his willingness to invite the expressive rhetoric of a Lully, Purcell and the Italian 17th century to the party, bold, at times controversial, but always animated by an eye to the emotional jugular. It never felt as if he was merely trying to shake people out of their complacency in the face of a much-loved warhorse; rather that he was going back to first principals and trying to imagine the piece anew with honesty – and reinvigorating flair.

A lot depended on the attentiveness and flexibility of his musicians (who responded to the sometimes-extravagant conducting style with good grace – imagine Gok Wan crossed with a hyperactive penguin on steroids. What he’d be like in front of a choir of 400 for the Verdi Requiem doesn’t bear thinking about!). There were a few near car crashes to be sure, especially early in Part Two, and not all the choral ‘soloists’ surfed their Handelian runs at Bates’s exhilarating tempi with ease, but as a singer himself, Bates the conductor was particularly sympathetic to the shaping of the arias. Outstanding among the credited soloists was Anna Dennis whose bright yet warm soprano soared effortlessly, while Timothy Dickenson’s ‘Thus Saith the Lord’ had all the dark majesty of a Norfolk night sky. (If Rasputin had sung Handel, it would surely have sounded like this – although the stentorian refulgence had lost its edge by ‘Why do the nations so furiously rage together’ and had turned positively pussycat by ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’).

With the band living every moment as if lives depended on it (how often does your ear usually find itself drawn to the cellos in ‘Messiah’?), and most of the audience literally on the edge of seats, not merely listening but taking part vicariously, the raucous standing ovation at the end was pretty much guaranteed. To the aristocrat who praised his ‘noble entertainment’, Handel remarked that he’d wanted to do more than entertain: he’d hoped to make people ‘better’. Given the noble entertainment that La Nuova Musica served up, no one can have left the performance without feeling uplifted, enlightened and, well ‘better’ than when they went in. Truly, ‘Hallelujah’! (Paul Riley).

Copyright Paul Riley 2011