Who Needs Caroling? We've Got Handel.

Sorry for the light blogging this week. In addition to the usual rehearsal schedule, I'm actually moving across town this week, so today will likely be the last you hear from me in this space until the weekend.

I actually haven't seen much of most of my colleagues in the orchestra this week, either (Sarah included,) because this is the week that we split the orchestra for holiday programming purposes: 20 string players and a smattering of winds play Handel's Messiah off site (specifically, at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, and the St. Paul Cathedral,) while the rest of the group plays an assortment of family concerts and holiday pops shows at Orchestra Hall. A few hardy souls volunteer to play in both groups to pick up some extra present-shopping cash, which always seems like a great idea until you get to the day when you finish a double rehearsal at the hall at 7:05pm, and have 25 minutes to sprint the eight blocks to the Basilica and throw on a tux for the Messiah concert. The year I doubled up, I don't think I caught my breath until intermission.

Whenever I can, I try to get myself assigned to the Messiah split, because it's one of the few great big holiday blockbusters that I love every bit as much as the audiences who pack the concerts every December. I've got nothing against the Nutcracker, really, and Silent Night is lovely, but they do wear on you after the 127th time you play them.

The Messiah is different. I've loved it since I was a kid, and every time I play it, there are a couple of moments that bring tears to my eyes. I couldn't be less religious, but that's what makes Handel's oratorio so remarkable. Despite the use of sacred texts (mainly Old Testament stuff about the coming of the Messiah) to form the backbone of the libretto, he hasn't written a mass meant to be slogged through at a Sunday morning church service; he's taken the biography of the central figure in Christianity and set it to music of such passion and personal feeling that you can't help but be moved. It's really less of a sacred work than it is a secular work on sacred themes - more Chronicles Of Narnia than the Book of John.

The soloists sing as if they were personal friends of Jesus, and are reacting to events as they occur, rather than reciting some dry bit of religious history. The first words you hear are not some declaration of God's power or our unworthiness as people, but a calming, understated, "comfort ye; speak ye peace" from the tenor, while the orchestra murmurs soothingly in the background. When the soprano tells you to "rejoice greatly," the music carries her to a place where she can't help but sound overcome with childlike glee; when the bass bellows, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?", there is a raging storm going on underneath him in the strings to drive home the point. And towards the end, after the crucifixion and the famous Hallelujah chorus, Handel takes everything way down as the soprano sweetly (naively, perhaps?) asserts her certainty that Jesus still lives, and the chorus responds with a hushed, chilling declaration that "since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead."

It's bone-deep, this music, and though I've never studied the piece from a music theory perspective, I suspect that Handel was way ahead of his time in the way he approached its composition. Playing it doesn't feel like playing baroque music on modern instruments usually does; there's a muscularity and a defiant stride to the sound, and Handel makes use of effects that I know for a fact weren't in common use in church music, circa 1741. It's an opera without sets, really, and that might be why it's so popular among audiences. (In fact, I hear you're pretty much out of luck if you don't already have a ticket to our performances this week.) Stories you've already heard a thousand times need some serious immediacy if they're going to touch you in anything like a meaningful way, and Handel knew just what buttons to push.