Open Writing

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Handel: Messiah - Glenese Blake (sop.), Carmel Carroll (contr.), Kenneth Cornish (ten.), Edward Scorgie (bass), Victor Baughen (cornet), Betty Stewart (organ), Whangarei Choral Society, Virginia Hill (conductor), St. Francis Xavier Church, Whangarei, New Zealand.

The last time I attended a performance of Handel’s Messiah, which was a fair few years ago, I battled through dreary, dark, damp streets, with all my hatches battened down against the all-but-freezing, windy weather. My destination was not a comfy seat in the stalls, but a cramped broadcasting studio from where I heard, through headphones, the mighty Huddersfield Choral Society accompanied by a substantial orchestra. This occasion could not have offered a greater contrast.

Having been resident in New Zealand for a nadge under three months, I was literally tingling with anticipation at this, my very first opportunity to witness some proper “upside-down” music-making. I was in such a state that the idea of doing a review never even entered my head until afterwards. Hence: no notebook, and an account that is more a recollection of my experience than a review as such.

I sallied forth on a pleasantly warm, sunny, early summer’s afternoon, needing but a few minutes’ leisurely drive down Kamo Road to arrive at St. Francis Xavier Church – where a gentleman in an orange “day-glo” jacket directed me into a convenient parking space. That’s one luxury that Huddersfield never afforded me!

Lugging my cardigan – just in case the seats were hard – I made my way in and weighed up the “auditorium”. As you’d expect, the focal point is the altar table, set on a stepped dais that, backed by a tall wall, extends across the full width of the room. In the right-hand corner stands a substantial organ. During the performance, “resting” soloists took refuge behind the table, whilst the choir was arrayed, off-centre, between there and the organ.

Above the altar is the high point of the ceiling, surmounted by a glazed turret. From there the ceiling slopes downwards, terminating at normal room height behind the semicircular, sectored seating. Surfaces are smooth and white, setting off the polished wood of the sea of seating and the simple but strikingly handsome organ facade. With carpet fitted throughout, it looks splendid; wonderfully light and airy, and is – obviously – designed specifically for acoustical clarity during services.

Now, what this utterly self-centred music-lover wants from a venue is a balance between clarity and ambience, plus a respectable reverberation to fill the cracks with memories of the music’s passing – in other words, what I’d found when recording in centuries-old churches built from slabs of rough-hewn Yorkshire stone. What I was looking at – and hearing in the hum of conversation – was the same acoustic intention found in any number of latter-day conference halls, all of which, musically speaking, sound as dry as dust, with reverberation times measured in microseconds. I felt a tremor of trepidation: about thirty years ago I had heard Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie strangled at birth by the auditorium of the then-new Harrogate Conference Centre – was this going to be the same? Perish the thought.

When the music began, my anxiety – or, rather, over-anxiety – evaporated rapidly. Alright, so reverberation was not on the menu, but I was agreeably amazed to find that the expected clarity, far from being desiccated, was complemented by a warm bloom. My mind rubbed its metaphorical hands together – when all’s said and done, two out of three is not bad – and I gladly turned my attention to the music and its makers.

Somehow, this performance of Messiah seemed much shorter – or less long – than usual. You couldn’t blame speed or wholesale abridgement, because the performance lasted over two hours and omitted only the chorus Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder. Nor could I accuse my utterly unfamiliar circumstances, because these usually have precisely the opposite effect on subjective time, don’t they?

The true reason was the performance itself. When a work is so often performed by all and sundry, creeping competitiveness is inevitable. Folk indulge in ever-fancier footwork, trying to find “something new” to make their efforts stand out. In my experience, Handel’s meditation does not take kindly to such treatment. As if to prove my point, here it was played with a dead straight bat and, through the simple expedient of not trying to stand out, to my ears it did just that.

Whether by design or happy accident, the soloists were party to the plot. Shunning unseemly exaggeration, they played their parts with all due dignity. As a former pupil of Whangarei Girls’ High School, Glenese Blake is what we might call a “local heroine”. In quiet passages, her voice could charm the birds out of the trees, and she kept a gratifying grip on her upper register when ascending to climaxes – even when, at the words “risen from the dead”, she was assailed by the sound of the local rescue helicopter, “risen from its launch-pad”.

As well as concert singing, Carmel Carroll’s background includes a lot of opera. Carmel left the operatic technique safely tucked away, but brought her operatic experience to bear, as in her stately singing of He Was Despised, which was a model of simplicity, and all the more moving for it.

Kenneth Cornish has one of those lovely “open-necked” voices, that remain pure and strain-free all the way up. This vocal quality is mildly redolent of the castrato voice (no, I’m not implying anything!), so it fits Handel like a glove does a hand, a coincidence of which Kenneth took full advantage.

Throughout Messiah, I can feel that customary broad correspondence between the text’s mood and the “height” of the voice, with the bass, as ever, getting the lion’s share of the “doom and gloom”. It follows that Handel pulled a really neat trick in giving The Trumpet Shall Sound to the bass. Although Edward Scorgie, far too fresh of face for a gloomy old bass, didn’t look the part, he sounded it, singing with exemplary gravity and dignity.

“If you can’t get an orchestra, get an organ” would seem to me to be pretty sound advice – organs generally beat pianos hands-down when it comes to timbral range and sustained tone. So it was here, where the organ so often subtly amplified the harmonic space around the choir. Of course, to get it right requires careful judgement from both organist and conductor. Between them, Betty Stewart and Virginia Hill judged it to a “T”; I lost count of how often my mind went “Ahh!” Coming courtesy of Whangarei Brass, Victor Baughen’s soprano cornet provided the one essential that the organ couldn’t – the “trumpet” that must sound in The Trumpet Shall Sound and, for good measure, also cast its brazen glow over three of the choruses.

Speaking of choruses, I should mention the choir! It’s often commented that the preponderance of juicy choruses – sometimes two or three on the trot – is what endears Messiah to choral societies. Less often, it’s hinted that the same applies to audiences. I will freely admit that, much as I enjoy solo singing, it’s always the choir that really titillates my hackles. There are, of course, certain riders – like, “As long as the singing doesn’t make me wince.” But - why is it that the applause for a performance of Messiah largely goes to the soloists and conductor, whilst the choir – the real star of the show – is left standing modestly in the background? It just doesn’t seem fair.

I was mightily impressed by Whangarei’s crew of modest souls. With a somewhat lop-sided complement of 19 sopranos, 14 altos, 7 tenors and 12 basses, balance and blend must have been problematic. The sopranos could so easily have dominated whilst the tenors struggled. Instead, the sopranos traded volume for purity and evenness of tone, whilst the tenors traded the other way. Also, rarely have I heard altos “cut through” so clearly, almost if not quite equal to the sopranos (the basses, as I well know, can take care of themselves).

Inevitably this adversely affected the blend, although that was minimised by the astutely-judged organ accompaniment. It is, in any case, of little consequence, because in polyphonic music the linear balance matters much more. Clearly, this could not be accidental, but had to be the result of careful thought, sound judgement and hard work, and for those we must thank the conductor. What a joy it was to be able to hear every strand, with phrases bouncing happily off one another, exactly as their maker intended.

It all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, of course, it wasn’t. There was plenty I could quibble over, like a lack of any really quiet singing, or a rather too “one size fits all” approach to tempi. However, I won’t. Why? Well, certainly not because afterwards I learned that the WCS is an “open” choir. I’ve always believed that if you’ve the brass neck to perform before a paying public, you’ve earned the right to be critically assessed the same as the best of them.

In fact, the reason lies not with them, but with me. Along with my notebook, I’d left the bulk of my critical faculties at home. I’d not come as a critic, but as one looking for an afternoon to remember, and, by golly, that’s exactly what I got. Not for the first time, the subliminal sense of “community” that comes from hearing ordinary folk performing before their peers, straining against the limits of their capabilities, affected me in a way that confounds conventional criticism.