CityLife

The Sixteen: Celebrating Handel

The Sixteen
Bridgewater Hall
January 8, 2010

THE first of the Bridgewater Hall’s new array of ‘associate artists’ to inaugurate their status with a major concert, The Sixteen – consisting in fact of a choir of 18 plus an even more numerous orchestra – drew a big, enthusiastic audience on a cold winter’s night.

Inside all was warmth and gladness, metaphorically as literally, for Harry Christophers and his happy band. And what better way to celebrate the new era than with a programme of Handel’s ceremonial music? (There is a CD to promote as well, as it happens, with virtually the same content).

All four Coronation Anthems of 1727 were the main ingredients: Zadok The Priest is the one everyone knows, but My Heart Is Inditing and The King Shall Rejoice are wonderful pieces, too, and Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened deserved its outing, too.

It was the Christophers treatment of Zadok that got me thinking. We were encouraged to hear the later pieces from Handel’s oratorios (The Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba, the organ concerto in F op, 4, no. 4, the overture to Jephtha and the final choruses of Messiah) as developments of a style created for those Coronation pieces, bringing their ceremonial grandeur into the conventions of the operatic theatre.

Peerless

But Handel was undoubtedly a showman from the start, and the pure shock of the choral entry in Zadok, when its instrumental introduction is as underplayed as it was on this occasion, was theatrical and no mistake. 

The sense of cumulative climax, that can no doubt also be found in that introduction, was not missing: Christophers built that wonderfully in My Heart Is Inditing, which preceded Zadok. In between there was the organ concerto – with a ‘Hallelujah’ chorus added to it as in the original context of Athalia in 1735. That made it a total of four Hallelujah or Alleluia choruses, I reckon (if you count the Zadok finale), without even using the Messiah one.

Alastair Ross is a peerless continuo organist and was a constant asset to the blended sound produced by the orchestra: his solo in the concerto was, however, somewhat studied in its phrasing and produced an almost limping effect compared with the running rhythms favoured by the conductor elsewhere.

There was still room within Christophers’ approach for imaginative shaping of melody and vivid contrast, as he showed most clearly in The King Shall Rejoice. The Messiah choruses (Worthy Is The Lamb and Amen) were as weighty as they could be in the circumstances but, I must admit, made me long for the guilty pleasure of an old-fashioned massed choir.

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