Handel: Messiah (Concert Review - The Mail on Sunday, 2000)

...recent years have seen attempts to escape from the Victorian massed-choir approach: to recapture its dramatic, brilliant and occasionally racy qualities the must have hit Handelian audiences between the eyes. And that's exactly what we got at Smith Square from the Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment - one of Europe's finest period-performance bands - and the small professional choir Polyphony, whose conductor, Stephen Layton, is the name to note these days in choral circles.

Under his swift, sleek, one-to-a-bar beat, the nations raged, sheep went astray and people walked in darkness at a sprint - but lightly, joyously, without the sense of being driven by a cracked whip. And although the soloists weren't wholly Premier League, they did include the eloquent Mark Padmore, tenor, and celebrity soprano Emma Kirkby stretching out her thin soprano to a brighter, fuller substance than I've heard in ages.

One odd thing was that Layton seemed to be encouraging his singers to give their English words a German-sounding ring, and the only reason I can imagine for that is that he wanted us to hear the text as Handel did. Handel, of course, was German, and he never really mastered English, which is why the word-setting in Messiah is rather bad, with a lot of the emphasis in the wrong place. Knowing it so well, we tend not to notice. But this performance, which positively relished the odd way Handel sets words such as "incorruptible" (it becomes incor-rupti-ble"), seemed intent on shaking the familiarity out of the piece and offering it as something you are hearing for the first time. That's exciting. And it gets my vote.

Michael White