delicate and precise
Transferred for one night only from Glyndebourne’s autumn season to the Royal Albert Hall, this Messiah under Aidan Oliver and the Glyndebourne Sinfonia (leader Richard Milone), with the Glyndebourne Chorus and soloists Soraya Mafi, Claire Barnett-Jones, James Way and James Platt, offered a strikingly intimate reading of Handel’s oratorio in a resolutely non-intimate space.
Before Glyndebourne, my sole understanding to Handel, especially Messiah, was quite Karajanian – grand, assertive and intense. This night refreshed my reading. Milone lead a Sinfonia that sounded lush, saturated and opulent, in stark contrast to Karajan’s metallic brightness that I was so used to. The playing was delicate and slightly sentimental, which matched Oliver’s conducting in a consistent way. On the way home with my friend, we discussed that even his gestures were notably gentle and tender as if he was tending a velvet carpet. This gave the sinfonia a soft and transparent texture going hand in hand with Handel’s dance rhythms and affective details.
The chorus feels a little bit intentionally held back in a good sense. Their voices were carefully curated and dynamically controlled, offering a precise, nuanced texture. Even in the most climatic choruses (e.g. the Hallelujah when everyone in the hall stood up), it felt humanely joyful rather than overwhelmingly grandiose. Soprano Mafi’s voice was crystal-clear and pure. In the softer passages she leaned into a delicate light mix with uncanny evenness. Even in a venue like Royal Albert Hall, she mastered the art to let her voice linger in the air. Barnett-Jones, as mezzo, brought a complementary, modest energy: slightly weighted, but still carefully curated.
Tenor James Way sang with exquisite delicacy and nuance, sometime his soft timbre even shading towards an almost countertenor-like colour, deftly comforting. To support that exquisiteness, Bass James Platt offered his vocal depth in quality not quantity. He did not lean heavily into his chest resonance; thus, while his low notes were well-present and grounded, they never sounded over-pouring.
If you are already tamed to the Germanic aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s, this will be a challenge for you to refresh your reading of early Baroque music. You may feel reluctant and disoriented because the familiar Wagnerian weight of sonority has gone. In its place emerges a chamber-scaled world of transparency and rhetorical precision. This chamber-scaled sensibility, I reckon, would have worked even better at Glyndebourne’s own opera house rather than at the Royal Albert Hall that might be a bit “oversized”, and thus loses some focus on intimacy and fine engraving. However, for myself, I am so ready to go to Glyndebourne Opera House very soon.