{"id":17889,"date":"2014-12-08T11:03:55","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T00:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundslikesydney.com.au\/?p=17889"},"modified":"2014-12-08T11:03:55","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T00:03:55","slug":"review-handels-messiahst-marys-singers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikesydney.com.au\/?p=17889","title":{"rendered":"Review: Handel’s Messiah\/St Mary’s Singers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hanmess2\"<\/p>\n

Handel: Messiah<\/em><\/p>\n

St Mary\u2019s Singers<\/em><\/p>\n

St Mary\u2019s Cathedral, Sydney<\/em><\/p>\n

6 December 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/i>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Performances of Handel\u2019s Messiah<\/i> are a habitual prelude to the Christmas season, with presentations in churches and concert halls throughout the country.\u00a0 Musical styles are as varied as the performance locations, ranging from attempts to recreate original eighteenth century practices to massed performances with hundreds of singers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The recent performance at St Mary\u2019s cathedral was a middle-of-the road version with a choir of 70 singers and an orchestra of 21, mostly playing modern instruments.\u00a0 It was under the direction of Oliver Brett, the assistant director of music at St. Mary\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The cathedral has a notoriously difficult acoustic for concerts which include an orchestra. \u00a0The reverberation time is very long and the sound from solo singers, who are usually placed at the crossing, tends to be swallowed up in the vastness of the building.\u00a0 Indeed, from half-way back in the nave the performers for this performance had to compete with recurring sirens and the sound of heavy rain outside.\u00a0 Much subtle detail was simply lost.<\/p>\n

\u00a0After a somewhat ponderous overture, Oliver Brett kept the work moving with some judicious cutting of numbers and with well-chosen, often spritely tempi. \u00a0His gestures to the performers seemed to concentrate on time-keeping rather than subtlety of interpretation, and the acoustics did not help in maintaining synchronisation between choir and orchestra in some of the more complex passages.<\/p>\n

The St Mary\u2019s Singers is a mixed choir who are part of the wider musical establishment of the cathedral.\u00a0 They sang with conviction, though often with reduced confidence in the polyphonic sections.\u00a0 Numerically, the altos were the largest section but they also produced the least sound.\u00a0 The sopranos dominated the choral sound and the tenors, although few in number, made a satisfying contribution.\u00a0 A stronger bass line would have been desirable.\u00a0 The choir stood for most of the performance, although in the second half they briefly retreated the choir stalls for a short rest.\u00a0 Refreshed, they returned for a full-throated rendition of the Hallelujah chorus, which also provided the audience with a welcome opportunity to stand for a few minutes before resuming their seats on the cathedral\u2019s penitential wooden pews.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of the soloists, the tenor Damien Arnold and soprano Morgan Balfour were most successful in projecting their voices into the deeper recesses of the cathedral.\u00a0 Arnold has a bright, clear tenor sound that is well suited to Handel.\u00a0 He has only recently graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium and it will be interesting to see how this promising young singer develops in future.\u00a0 Morgan Balfour sang with an attractive, clear voice with a particularly bright upper register.\u00a0 She recently graduated from the Brisbane Conservatorium and will also be a singer to watch.\u00a0 The young baritone Benjamin Caukwell has a pleasant light voice but it does not have the weight of tone needed in sections such as \u2018The people that walked in darkness\u2019.\u00a0 Although more experienced than her younger colleagues, Nancy Long found that the low tessitura of the solo contralto part did not lie in a comfortable register for her voice. \u00a0Her sound did not project very well into the middle of the cathedral, in spite of Oliver Brett ensuring that the orchestra was subdued when required.\u00a0 All the solo singers tried to apply eighteenth century practice with appoggiaturas and discreet ornamentation.\u00a0 However all of them also experienced occasional intonation problems, probably due to the strain of trying to project their voices into such a cavernous venue.<\/p>\n

The orchestra included several key players from the Australian Chamber Orchestra and this experienced group produced a tidy, creditable performance, even if there were occasional suggestions that some of the players might have been almost sight-reading.<\/p>\n

Mention must be made of John Foster\u2019s fine trumpet solo in the bass aria \u2018The trumpet shall sound\u2019 where he used a natural trumpet.\u00a0 This was a good decision in cathedral\u2019s resonant acoustic as the instrument\u2019s lighter sound did not overpower the other performers.\u00a0 In the same aria is a pity that the singer missed an entry and the music was left hanging in the air for a time.<\/p>\n

At the conclusion, the performance was enthusiastically applauded by the large audience which more than half filled the cathedral.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Larry \u00a0for SoundsLikeSydney\u00a9<\/em><\/p>\n

Larry Turner has been singing in choirs for many years \u2013 both in Sydney and London.\u00a0 He is an avid attender of operas and concerts, with an emphasis on vocal music.\u00a0 He particularly enjoys music from both the great a capella period and the baroque \u2013 especially the lesser-known works of Bach and Handel.\u00a0 He has written programme notes for Sydney Philharmonia, the Intervarsity Choral Festival and the Sydneian Bach Choir and is currently part of a team researching the history of Sydney Philharmonia for its forthcoming centenary.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Handel: Messiah St Mary\u2019s Singers St Mary\u2019s Cathedral, Sydney 6 December 2014 \u00a0 Performances of Handel\u2019s Messiah are a habitual prelude to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"sls_format":[],"class_list":["post-17889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"acf":{"deck":"","is_featured":false,"media_type":"standard","audio_embed":"","video_url":""},"yoast_head":"\nReview: Handel's Messiah\/St Mary's Singers - Sounds Like Sydney<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/soundslikesydney.com.au\/?p=17889\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Review: Handel's Messiah\/St Mary's Singers - 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