Tafelmusik Handel celebration rides on chorus and orchestra
Tafelmusik
(out of 4) With guests. Ivars Taurins, conductor. To Sunday at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, 427 Bloor St. W. (And May 7 at George Weston Recital Hall.) 416-964-6337 or tafelmusik.org
The Tafelmusik Orchestra and Chamber Choir is paying tribute to the English-speaking world’s bestloved baroque composer, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), with a garland of great choruses, arias and duets.
In Thursday’s concert at Trinity- St. Paul’s Church, conductor Ivars Taurins coaxed big, colourful and ultimately very satisfying performances out of the period instrumentalists and choristers. Had he been able to get the same kind of singing out of his two soloists, the conductor would have been able to score one of the season’s triumphs. Soprano Sophie Daneman’s small, lyric voice and tendency to sing beautifully rather than dramatically would have been far more at home in the company of a small consort singing music from the Renaissance. Tenor Rufus Müller, a frequent and welcome guest with the orchestra, left a fine impression on the recent new recording of Handel’s Messiah with Tafelmusik, but he appeared to be holding back a bit too much on Thursday night. The program itself was a treat, crafted to follow two similar dramatic arcs, one more sacred, the other built around the joys and disappointments of love. Handel, like most composers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, liberally dipped into his own output to recycle and repurpose arias and choruses. So it was perfectly fine for Taurins and his cohorts to stitch together the semblance of two new oratorios for our listening pleasure. Taurins, the orchestra and chorus are such veterans of this music that they can take the notes and balance almost for granted, putting all their effort into crafting something particularly beautiful.