Handel's Messiah: Emmanuelle Haïm

During the immediate post-war period when he was a freelance musician, my father frequently declared that Handel wrote his Messiah so that orchestral musicians would never starve during the month of December. I thought of him this Christmas week when, quite by chance, a new recording of the Messiah arrived, a release conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm, a conductor I have frequently admired in the past.

As a very young teenager, I was given six or so 78 rpm records of the Messiah featuring, as I recall it, excerpts from the first part. Haïm's Messiah is somewhat different from these old recordings from the 1940s, but I liked it very much. The orchestra is French, and well recorded. The chorus is British, some twenty singers in number, and gives a welcome clarity to Handel's choruses with sufficient weight and gravitas, in a recording, to do justice to Handel's great choral numbers. The vocal quartet is also British, with Lucy Crowe as the jewel in the crown; she really is one of my favourite baroque sopranos. Unfortunately Haïm opts for a dreaded counter-tenor rather than for a female alto or contralto; maybe she had little choice after pressure from the castratos' union but, I, for one, prefer the natural voices of soprano, tenor, alto and bass rather than this strange counter-tenor breed. An excellent recording and balance by a French team for Erato makes this a very strong version of Messiah. I never thought I'd be listening to the oratorio during Christmas week. Haïm is forceful and exuberant, as ever, but without going to the extreme lengths of some conductors of baroque music (though I could have done with a slightly more reticent drummer, on occasions; he does tend to thwack a bit). Anyway: three stars.