Get Out! Oh Thou that Tell'st Good Tidings to Zion -- Behold . . . Your . . .
Just Me
Jim
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11xABcKjux8&feature=related
>
> Goddam GOD!!!!
Who's the chorus? Academy of St Martin in the Fields,
I gather from one of the comments. That's the outfit
with the long Georgian steeple that appears in every
hamlet in New England and half the Baptist
churches in Dallas. A form of Neoclassical.
If you want magnificent churches, I recommend
San Francisco. Catholics build the grandest
churches (and are the best chefs), and San
Francisco is a predominantly Catholic city to
the extent that anyone there is religious. Paris
is another such place on a larger scale. That is,
the 3% of the population who aren't atheists are
nominally Catholic.
Do they play Handel's music in Baptist churches?
I associate the architectural style with liberality,
while Baptists say their liberality comes from their
being autonomous congregations, not subject
to diktat from some place like Rome (or
Atlanta).
Just Me
Here , , ,
Gotta tellya -- wasn't easy to come by. It's not the Mormon Tabernacle
masterpiece, but it's the best I could drum up for free, full length
on line. I cannot listen to Messiah without going nuts, even at not
such a great performance, as this. The Mormons love every word they
sing, and that makes all the difference.
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=6581236&m=17357382
Jim
Philadelphia Orchestra's chorus. Thanks.
Post-Ormandy, the NPR guy said. In
his day, they employed a chorus with 377
members. Boy, that's about the size of
the Mormon Tabernacle.
If you're interested, BBC R3 has been featuring
Handel as one of four "Composers of the
Year" (along with Haydn, Mendelssohn, and
Purcell).
I have 30 or 40 books to go with the
subject, but you don't want the entire list.
I offer...
ObBook: _The Cambridge Companion to Handel_,
Donald Burrows, ed. Includes good backgrounder
on Baroque London, a place where your
well-heeled fellow walked on the outside
with his lady when passing beneath
windows so that he got splatted by
the pisspot being dumped rather than
she.
Just Me
> Philadelphia Orchestra's chorus. Thanks.
>
> Post-Ormandy, the NPR guy said.
Right.
> In
> his day, they employed a chorus with 377
> members. Boy, that's about the size of
> the Mormon Tabernacle.
>
> If you're interested, BBC R3 has been featuring
> Handel as one of four "Composers of the
> Year" (along with Haydn, Mendelssohn, and
> Purcell).
I am. But what is that, something on the Web or . . .
>
> I have 30 or 40 books to go with the
> subject, but you don't want the entire list.
> I offer...
Man. What do you have in the way of first hand accounts of those early
performances, the Dublin, the Covent Garden, the Foundling Hospital?
All I've ever been able to locate is that Dublin newspaper review, and
some commentary to the effect that all the former ridicule of Handel
around London was so stubbornly stuck to the British consciousness
that despite the King's obvious pleasure with the Covent Garden
English premiere, the critics were not moved. And that it was only by
way of the Foundling Hospital performances years later that the
English finally started coming around to appreciate Messiah for what
it really was.
>
> ObBook: _The Cambridge Companion to Handel_,
> Donald Burrows, ed. Includes good backgrounder
> on Baroque London, a place where your
> well-heeled fellow walked on the outside
> with his lady when passing beneath
> windows so that he got splatted by
> the pisspot being dumped rather than
> she.
And some of those chamber pots, previous to his eventual comeback,
were no doubt aimed right at the poor man's head, whichever side upon
which he was given to walk, short of those gaping gates to debtor's
prison. It was like the life of Socrates all over again--for don't
they say that John Gay's "Beggar's Opera" was written specifically to
serve to Handel, what Aristophanes' "Clouds" brought to a boil in the
Hemlock soup given for the last supper of that philosopher? Amazing
how a man once so beloved by the English audience had come to be an
object of such toxic scorn. I wonder to what it tends to be
attributed?
"He was despised,
And rejected of men,
A man of sorrows,
and acquainted with grief."
Perhaps it was God's doing? That His own appointed court composer,
should walk a mile in his own Son's sandals, in order to get it right?
--
JM