‘Tis the season when a glut of performances of Messiah will indubitably be coming your way. And in honour of an annual obsession that ensures that Handel’s oratorio routinely tops the polls of the most performed piece of classical music world over, here’s our top 10 takes on the work and its famous Hallelujah Chorus. Some, like my final choice – Claus Guth’s recent staging of the complete work – are worth sticking with until the end; others may cause a kitsch-overload after about 30 seconds, like drinking too much eggnog before breakfast. You have been warned.
But we start with the best: Mozart’s reworking and re-scoring of Messiah from 1789, his tribute to a composer he venerated, and a way of bringing the piece into the Viennese enlightenment with clarinets, trombones, flutes and trumpets.
And here’s what Messiah became in the early decades of the 20th century: an amazing moment of the ultimate in big-band performances from Crystal Palace in the early 1930s, performed thrillingly stentorianly by thousands of players and singers.
And here’s where it starts to get a bit silly: yes, it’s Hallelujah the dance version! Anno Domini turn Handel’s chorus into one of the great crimes against musical and – in this fan-made video – visual taste, as gyrating medievalists make Handel’s music and Charles Jennens’s words wish they had never been written.
Back to Crystal Palace in 1935 to cleanse the palate, and the soul … The massed bands of the National Brass Band festival give a magnificently impassioned account of Messiah’s Amen chorus.
Before one of the acmes of festive ridiculousness on YouTube: from Edmond, Oklahoma, a synchronised Christmas-lights and traduced-video show of the Hallelujah Chorus projected on to a family house. Some 15,000 LED lights and a 15-ft screen combine to create something that defies sense, belief, and all known boundaries of Christmas taste.
Too much? Compared to the Oklahoma projections Too Hot to Handel’s jazzed-up version of the Hallelujah Chorus seems a zenith of musical propriety, sung with irresistible enthusiasm …
… an enthusiasm that this version of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah Rocks curdles into something terrifyingly kitschtastic.
But André Rieu tries something in a way even more scary in his version from New York in 2004, in what looks like a patronising attempt to show that Handel’s music speaks a universal language: he adds vocal lines to Handel’s score, and dresses up the Harlem Gospel Choir in “African” clothes while warbling sopranos and three ersatz tenors smile around them.
A relief, then to hear the Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero’s subtle and sensitive improvisation on the Hallelujah melody.
And, at last, here is a chance to experience a re-versioning of the whole of Handel’s Messiah that honours its continuing intellectual and spiritual power: Claus Guth’s recent staging from Vienna. Controversial, contemporary, thought-provoking, and above all, moving, Guth’s grief-stricken vision of Messiah resonates in ways that Handel and Jennens surely couldn’t have imagined, but it makes new meanings for this music; it might not be festive, but, for me, Guth’s production is a real gift of the season.
