Tradition + Faith

Sunday, December 15, 2013 • 3:00 p.m.
First Free Methodist Church

Orchestra Seattle
Seattle Chamber Singers
Clinton Smith, conductor
Angela Mortellaro, soprano
Sarah Larsen, mezzo-soprano
Brad Benoit, tenor
Charles Robert Stephens, baritone

Program

Georg Frideric Handel (1685–1759)
Messiah, HWV 56

About the Concert

No other work has become more closely associated with OSSCS than Georg Frideric Handel’s most celebrated oratorio, Messiah. For four decades, audiences have delighted in our complete and uncut performances. After a three-year interval, Handel’s masterpiece returns with our new music director on the podium.

“Handel’s Messiah,” says Clinton Smith, “was for so many loyal OSSCS audience members the highlight of each concert season, so I am happy to bring back this tradition.”

About the Soloists

Soprano Angela Mortellaro,

who holds degrees in music performance from Rice University and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, is a versatile performer, well versed in both operatic and concert repertoire. Last season she sang the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor with Minnesota Opera and Dayton Opera, and during the 2013–2014 season she will star in the title role of Thaïs with Florida Grand Opera, sing Anna in Nabucco at Opera Philadelphia, Adele in Die Fledermaus with Sarasota Opera, and Jean Acker in Argento’s Dream of Valentino with Minnesota Opera. A proponent of contemporary opera, Ms. Mortellaro sang Madeleine Audebert in Minnesota Opera’s wildly successful world premiere of Kevin Puts’ Silent Night, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Mezzo-soprano Sarah Larsen is a recent alumna of the Seattle Opera Young Artist Program, where her mainstage roles included Mercédès in Carmen, Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, Tisbe in La Cenerentola and the First Touriere in Suor Angelica. The News Tribune praised her Suzuki as “smart, succinct and with a sultry mezzo that belied her demure demeanor.” In May 2013, she premiered a new song cycle, Farewell, Auschwitz, by Jake Heggie and Gene Sheer with Music of Remembrance, soon to be recorded by Naxos. In 2014 she returns to Seattle Opera as Maddalena in Rigoletto and the Secretary in The Consul, and reprises her critically acclaimed Suzuki for Tacoma Opera. Learn more: sarahlarsenmezzo.com

Tenor Brad Benoit has sung many roles with Minnesota Opera, including Ruiz in Il trovatore, Arlecchino and Lampwick in The Adventures of Pinocchio, Count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville, Gabriele in Casanova’s Homecoming, Lord Cecil in Roberto Devereux, Parpingol in La bohème, the Third Jew in Salome, Gastone in La traviata and Pong in Turandot. For the opening night of the world premiere of Kevin Puts’ Silent Night, he sang the role of Nicklaus Sprink at the last minute from the side of the stage, to rave reviews. Mr. Benoit is a graduate of Chicago College of the Performing Arts and Loyola University New Orleans, and has participated in prestigious training programs at Santa Fe Opera, Chicago Opera Theater and the Staunton Music Festival.

Baritone Charles Robert Stephens has enjoyed a career spanning a wide variety of roles and styles in opera and concert music, with Opera News praising him for “committed characterization and a voice of considerable beauty.” At New York City Opera, he sang the role of Prof. Friedrich Bhaer in the New York premiere of Mark Adamo’s Little Women, and was hailed by The New York Times as a “baritone of smooth distinction.” He has sung on numerous occasions at Carnegie Hall in a variety of roles with Opera Orchestra of New York, the Oratorio Society of New York, the Masterworks Chorus and Musica Sacra, as well as with ensembles throughout the Pacific Northwest. Learn more: seidelartistsmgmt.com

Program Notes

Georg Frideric Handel
Messiah, HWV 56

Handel was born in Halle, Germany, on February 23, 1685, and died in London on April 14, 1759. He composed Messiah between August 22 and September 14 of 1741. The oratorio was first performed in Dublin on April 13, 1742, under the direction of the composer. In addition to a quartet of vocal soloists and choir, the work calls for 2 oboes, bassoon, 2 trumpets, timpani, harpsichord and strings.

Handel, renowned in his day as an organist and as a highly prolific writer of Italian operas and English oratorios, was born in Germany in 1685 about a month before J.S. Bach. He received his musical training in Italy, and later became 18th-century England’s “national composer.” Between February and November 1741, Handel—suffering at the age of 56 from various ailments, both financial and physical—withdrew increasingly from public life. At some point that year, the composer received from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and the governors of Dublin’s three major charitable institutions an invitation to travel to that city to aid the charities through the performance of his music. Handel was well known in Dublin as a church-music composer, and his works were often played there to benefit charities. It may thus have been this invitation that provided the incentive for Handel to compose “a new sacred Oratorio.” In July of 1741, Charles Jennens, who was responsible for the texts of Handel’s oratorios Israel in Egypt and Saul, gave the struggling Handel the libretto of Messiah, a compilation of biblical texts from both the Old and New Testaments.

On August 22, Handel began to set Jennens’ text to music. He finished the first part of his new oratorio (which deals with the prophecy of Christ’s coming and his nativity) in six days, the second part (which describes Jesus’ suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, the spread of his gospel, the resistance of the heathen, and the vision of the ultimate triumph of the gospel in the establishment of God’s kingdom) in nine days, and the third part (which celebrates the gift of resurrection and eternal life offered to all through Christ’s victory over death) in six more days, with two or three additional days for completing the orchestration. Regarding Handel’s state of mind during Messiah’s composition, biographer Jonathan Keates observes in his 1992 book Handel: The Man and Music that “etherealized visions of the elderly master refusing food, weeping into the semiquavers and having angelic hallucinations are mostly moonshine.”

In the autumn of 1741, Handel accepted the invitation to visit Dublin, arriving there on November 18 with the completed score of Messiah in his traveling bags, but it was not until April 13, 1742, that the oratorio received its premiere. Seven hundred people were able to squeeze into Dublin’s Musick Hall in Fishamble-street to hear the work performed by the choirs of Dublin’s two cathedrals (totaling fewer than 40 men and boys) and the string band (reinforced occasionally by trumpets and timpani—oboe and bassoon parts were written later), all directed from the keyboard by Mr. Handel himself. The work created a sensation: “Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience,” exulted Faulkner’s Journal. “The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.” Handel divided his share of the proceeds (about £400), as did the other performers, among Dublin’s three most important charities.

Messiah is unique among Handel’s works, being his only biblical oratorio using texts from the New Testament, and his only “Christian-contemplative” oratorio. Although the text is not a dramatic narrative but an epic-lyric poem celebrating Christian redemption, Handel’s musical approach in setting Jennens’ libretto was decidedly dramatic. The work’s three parts recall the three acts of Italian operas, and the oratorio is indeed a piece designed by a seasoned operatic professional to “entertain,” in the best sense of the word, listeners in a concert room, not chiefly to instruct or edify a congregation or to be used in any sort of worship.

Handel synthesizes the best elements of the three musical traditions in which he was steeped: the Italian, the German and the English. He makes use of Italian forms of musical expression, borrowing, rearranging and transforming into “duet-choruses” (such as “And he shall purify”) some passages from his own Italian love duets. In the “Pastoral Symphony” (entitled Pifa) that introduces the shepherds, Handel alludes to the music of the pifferari, the country bagpipers who descend the Italian mountains during the Christmas season to play in village streets. Handel employs German musical ideas, particularly in the music describing Jesus’ suffering and death, where the jagged dotted rhythms and forceful harmonies have a particularly German expressive quality. In that great “coronation march,” the “Hallelujah Chorus,” melodic fragments echoing the German chorale “Wachet auf” may be heard in “The kingdom of this world” and in “And he shall reign for ever and ever.” Handel’s melodic shapes, vocal treatment, grand anthem-like choruses, and text-setting display the “English character” that has ensured Messiah’s unchallenged supremacy in the English choral repertoire: in such arias as “He was despised” and “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” the rhythms of the music grow out of the natural speech rhythms of the words, so that the music expresses the text directly and powerfully, and then illustrates it almost visually (e.g., “Every valley shall be exalted,” “The people that walked in darkness,” and “All we, like sheep”).

The easy accessibility and glorious variety of the music that results from the confluence of these elements (and which often conceals the exalted art underlying it) has helped to guarantee Messiah’s survival, through a seeming infinitude of “arrangements,” versions and types of presentation, as one of the most popular pieces ever composed. As R.A. Streatfeild observes, “Messiah, if not Handel’s greatest work, is undoubtedly the most universal in its appeal” because it continues to sing to “high and low, rich and poor, wise and foolish alike” a magnificent song of salvation, fresh, vital and full of aesthetic and spiritual grace.

Lorelette Knowles