Messiah Review ****
24 December 2010
Despite a sadistically unheated church and an audience huddled stoically in scarves and overcoats, this was, as ever, the most operatically direct of Messiahs, its drama stripped to the bone by the Dunedin Consort’s tiny handful of voices and instrumentalists, conducted with unfaltering vigour by the renowned baroque specialist John Butt.
Only a performance of this quality could keep us glued – though frozen was maybe the mot juste – to our seats for so long.
Nothing dragged. Orchestral cadences were crunched impatiently into the close of a vocal phrase, and the old plink-plonk endings, which were used to extend a recitative after a singer had finished, were shunned.
The Pastoral Symphony was the briefest and sweetest of interludes. The Hallelujah Chorus – not sung like a grandiose insertion within inverted commas and no longer forcing the audience to its feet – was the natural outcome of all the music that led to it, the purity of Part One, the sombre veil dropped over the voices at the start of Part Two, the added energy (after an equally fleet Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder) as the great chorus finally swung into view.
With only eight choristers, and with the soloists adding their voices to the choruses, this performance was nothing if not small-scale, yet absolutely every note made its point and packed its punch, even if Sir Malcolm Sargent, the doyen of big, rousing Messiahs, would doubtless have despised it for its lightness of touch.
Tender violin and viola tone, two contrasted cellos, a secure pair of trumpets, a mellifluous chamber organ, and the sight of the conductor almost dancing with his harpsichord were among the magical ingredients. In their underpinning of the singers, such things were all that was needed.
Da capo arias, with entrancingly embellished repeats, transformed Susan Hamilton, Meg Bragle, Nicholas Mulroy, and Matthew Brook almost into operatic characters, though all four of them seemed to relish the fact that that was exactly what they were not.
Bragle, an American mezzo-soprano new to the otherwise familiar Dunedin team, brought edge as well as beauty to her music.
A model Messiah, then, which must surely have been heard to better effect, and certainly more comfortably, at Perth Concert Hall the previous night.
