Word: handeled
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...Handel to Hope. For the Sunday East Room service last week, the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church choir put on a half-hour version of Handel's Messiah (see Music). That evening, the program shifted from Handel to Hope as the comedian staged a preview of his Christmas show for the troops in Viet Nam. The audience included the Nixons, the Agnews, Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland, the Henry Fords, Lynda Bird Robb, Presidential Barber Steve Martini and a gaggle of other guests...
...suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly Host praising God" and singing Handel's Messiah. Though cynics may snarl "But who may abide the day of His coming?" they will be a small, silent (or at least ignored) minority. As Christmas threatens from Tokyo to Toledo, Messiahs are busting out again all over the world. The work is being staged, illustrated with color slides, tinkled through by tiny orchestras, blasted over by huge ones, shouted by great singers and squeaked by small ones. In New York and San Francisco, people are paying to sight-read...
Written during a hectic three-and-a-half weeks in the summer of 1741, Handel's oratorio has always been a smash. If a nearly endless succession of well-meaning popularizers have taken gross and extravagant liberties with it, Handel is partly to blame. A shrewd businessman, he ensured The Messiah's success by hiring the best and most popular singers in 18th century London to sing it. If the bass singer was not very good, Handel would turn the bass aria into a recitative, rewrite it for an alto or even a soprano. For flexible soprano voices...
Obese Orchestras. Thereafter, everybody got into the act. From Mozart to obscure professors, composers reorchestrated and rearranged The Messiah. Since everybody wanted to sing it too, the choruses became enormous, and orchestras swelled proportionately. On the theory that if Handel had had a big orchestra he would have used it, a series of uncalled-for instruments puffed Handel's clean, baroque textures into plodding Victorian obesity. This musical elephantiasis reached some sort of a climax in 1959, when Sir Thomas Beecham recorded a Messiah that sounded a bit like Richard Strauss's Elektra: with cymbals, bells, triangles...
...Symphony Orchestra, which gives every indication of expiring into another seven months of unremittingly harsh and indifferent prosecutions of emulsified, vindictively pasteurized programs gleaming with lambent somnolence. Kirchner does not specialize in conducting twentieth century music, although he has performed Stravinsky stunningly, but responds with equal sensitivity to Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. His programs of Bruckner, Varese, Handel, Stravinsky, and Beethoven exemplified this catholicism...