Chorale sings Handel’s ‘Messiah’
TRC will present work in three concerts this season
Exploring the greatness of Handel’s masterful oratorio “Messiah” will be a year-long project for the Texarkana Regional Chorale, starting with a concert at 5 p.m. Sunday.
The TRC will fill Sacred Heart Catholic Church with the glorious sound of this work, the first of three “Messiah” presentations the TRC has planned for their season. This concert is free for the community; donations are accepted.
Featured soloists are Candace Taylor, Kathleen Den BleykerThomas, Wayne Crannell and Eric Thomas with Marc-André Bougie conducting and Mary Scott Goode accompanying on piano for this concert of the first part of “Messiah.” They’ll perform a work that’s part of the core classical repertoire.
“This is a piece that everybody wants to sing,” Bougie said, noting if the whole work is performed with no cuts it’s more than two hours of music. In its three different sections, each presents a different religious point of view, he said.
The first section is often talked of as the Christmas one, but Bougie would also refer to it as the Advent portion.
“It’s a perfect Advent piece as well as a Christmas piece,” Bougie said, describing part two as much more dramatic, introspective and dark and part three as a spiritual reflection on the resurrection. They’ll be performed in the spring.
“We hope that people will attend each of the performances so over the course of the whole year they’ve had the ‘Messiah’ experience,” Bougie said.
Handel’s work on this oratorio is rooted in his experience learning to write operas in Italy, then doing so in England. Once there, he discovered the concept of an oratorio, which is similar to an opera but about a religious topic, Bougie explained. It has an overture, some arias and choruses.
Much cheaper to produce, the oratorio became all the rage, Bougie said. It also fulfilled the necessity of a musical production between Advent and Lent as there were no operas produced at that time of year, he said.
“That’s what gave rise to oratorios,” Bougie said. Handel worked with writers who selected texts to set up the stories.
In the case of Handel’s “Messiah,” that job fell to Charles Jennens, who went through scripture to create this story for the oratorio, making it more philosophical than the original narration of this story, Bougie said. From there, it was given to Handel to write the music, which he did in just a few short weeks in 1741.
Handel, explained the conductor, reused some of his old work. After all, the composer had a job to do and make this work with good tunes and choral progressions. Love songs were reworked.
“He recycled a lot of his previous materials,” Bougie said. Other composers had done this, too, even mining each other’s work.
Of this work, Bougie says, “It’s Biblically anchored but it can be dramatic … we can never forget the fact that Handel adapted his productions to the taste of the day.” It was essentially done to order for each performance.
What we think of now as the “Messiah” is considered the final version, but revisions and alterations were ongoing back in Handel’s time. Bougie teaches this piece in his music appreciation class, and everyone should know the “Hallelujah” chorus from the work.
“The music does stand out of everything else he did and wrote,” Bougie said, discussing it as a piece that connects to all human beings. There’s no explanation and it’s like a revelation, he believes.
“It doesn’t happen often,” Bougie said, noting sometimes it’s a moment and sometimes a whole piece. “Some composers have more of these moments … I think that’s the magic of a work like ‘Messiah’ … it’s intrinsically good.”
A little more than 50 TRC singers will perform, along with the soprano, alto, tenor and bass singers and a small instrumental ensemble. It’s the first time they’ve performed “Messiah” since he came to the TRC. It’s sort of a right of passage, and he’s looking forward to taking this coming year to do it right.
They’ve also put a lot of work into Sunday’s concert.
“We’ve been practicing nonstop for over two months,” Bougie said.
(Sacred Heart Catholic Church is located at 4505 Elizabeth St. in Texarkana, Texas.)