Off the plane that same day from a European tour, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists have returned to Handel’s Messiah after a gap of more than three decades, in the late “Covent Garden” version of 1752, different in detail but not essence from the more familiar Dublin edition. The conductor was the French baroque specialist Christophe Rousset, who gave Gallic accents to a work regarded as ineluctably English, by a German immigrant composer who made London his home.
Handel was naturalised in 1727, months after the completion of one of the city’s landmark churches, St Martin-in-the-Fields, where he may on occasion have played the organ. This is where last week’s Messiah took place. The intense, fast-flowing account – with soloists Ana Vieira Leite, Sarah Connolly, Andrew Staples, and William Thomas – demonstrated the brilliance of this newly revitalised group since their separation two years ago from their founder and artistic lodestar, John Eliot Gardiner. No need to rehearse that sorry tale, only to credit his long association.
He might have quarried the work’s emotional depths still more exhaustively than Rousset, who instead led a performance high on momentum and drama, quicksilver textures glinting and flickering with restless energy. Strings kept their bowings short and taut in rapid passages, an aural echo of birds’ feathers, quivering fanning and receding. Choral passages soared, this matchless ensemble only momentarily reflecting the demands of the past week of concerts.
King Charles was present. We all stood for the Hallelujah Chorus, as did he: the “he” in “he shall reign for ever and ever” being a higher authority than, even, the British monarch. Among the soloists, the young British bass William Thomas was commanding and fierce in his aria that asks the unanswerable: “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” The question hung in the air as we stepped outside into Trafalgar Square, a brightly illuminated Hanukkah menorah shining alongside the traditional Norwegian Christmas tree.