Messiah at St John's Smith Square, December 2022

“I come to hear this every year. For me this is when Christmas begins.” So said the man sitting next to me, as we waited for the performance of Handel’s Messiah that by tradition ends the Christmas Festival at St. John’s Smith Square – the beautiful, glowingly white Baroque deconsecrated church that is so utterly right for this work.

So many cherish Handel’s great oratorio at Christmas time, and there must have been countless performances in the past few weeks, all round the globe. In one sense this is surprising, because Messiah is not a straightforward shout of joy and praise at the good news of Christ’s birth, as other favourite Christmas pieces are. The second part tells the story of Christ’s Crucifixion, and has moments of anger as well as that supreme aria of sorrow at Christ’s suffering, “He was despised”. Not until the Hallelujah Chorus is sadness banished once and for all.

Stephen Layton, conductor of the 26 singers of the choir Polyphony and the 24 players of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment made sure we felt that constant play of hope and fear, dark and light, all aiming ultimately at triumph, that makes Messiah the masterpiece that it truly is.

Until that final triumph the keynotes were drama and uncertainty. Layton signalled his nervy, changeable approach right from the start, with an unexpected soft moment in the stern opening overture, and an equally unexpected hush on the repeat, almost immediately contradicted by an impatient crescendo. The most striking example of the way every feeling and attitude was pushed hard against its opposite was in the great chorus of Part 2, “Surely He hath borne our griefs”. “He was bruised for our iniquities” was almost painfully harsh, and to go from this to the vivid major-key pictorialism of “All we like sheep have gone astray”, the sopranos and basses wandering off high and low and stopping dead, as if those errant sheep had fallen off a cliff, was a shock. Handel’s pictorialism has never seemed so vivid.

In all this the young choir was heroically alert and alive and sang with full-blooded magnificence, the orchestral players matching them at every moment. The four soloists at the front, though unimpeachably stylish and expressive, didn’t seem to be on the same level of open-hearted, open-throated generosity. Iestyn Davies didn’t quite wring the heart in “He was despised”, soprano Anna Dennis seemed somewhat unsmiling even when the music smiled, tenor Gwilym Bowen though impassioned in delivery seemed somewhat vocally constricted. Only bass Matthew Brook matched the young heroes behind him. The sense of shining-eyed revelation in his rendition of “We shall all be changed, in a moment”, which comes almost at the end, was one of the evening’s great moments.

By now we had had the Hallelujah Chorus, for which Layton imperiously brought us all to our feet, and though it was unbuttoned and joyful there was no let up in dramatic urgency. Layton had a final surprise for us – an unusually slow tempo for the final Amen, which as a consequence had the space to rise to a stately magnificence, with the full organ thrown in at the very end for good measure. It was sublime, and as the man said, it felt as if the Christmas season was truly beginning.

Ivan Hewitt, The Telegraph, December 2022