★★★☆☆
This performance of Handel’s oratorio, given by the Classical Opera Company under Ian Page, was held in the 16th-century hall of Middle Temple, with its clutch of portraits of monarchs staring down at us from above the players and singers. The gallery of crowned heads does not include George II, who might have resented Page’s polite request that we did not stand during the Hallelujah chorus, a dubious tradition that the King supposedly initiated.
It’s the sort of pomp that would not sit well in a Classical Opera concert and it would have felt particularly jarring for this Hallelujah, delivered by the elegantly voiced nine-person chorus as a warm bath to close Part II of the oratorio rather than a tub-thumping set piece. A few more bodies might have allowed them to soar above the strings and the warm, ringing trumpets rather than glimmering behind them.
Scoring-wise, Page had almost gone back to first principles. At the premiere performances of Messiah, in Dublin, Handel even did without woodwind; here, a sole oboe was the concession to those brighter timbres, but the pulse of the piece was etched by the finely drawn continuo partnership of Catherine Rimer (cello) and Cecelia Bruggemeyer (bass). Sharper, showier contrasts — in tempo and dynamics — were sometimes needed.
The best of it, though, was wonderfully intimate and confessional, a mood struck superbly by the young tenor Stuart Jackson. Bearlike in figure, strikingly rapt in voice, his opening Comfort ye was electric and he was superbly attentive to the switches in emotional register in Charles Jennens’s heartfelt libretto. Every word compelled attention.
The soprano Sarah Fox was less direct in expression, but luminous in tone, and her rendition of I know that my Redeemer liveth glowed. Neal Davies’s more freighted “operatic” delivery sat less comfortably here, and while Angela Simkin’s velvety mezzo has immense promise, she seemed uncomfortable, tested at the bottom of her range and hazy on text.