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Amazon.com essential recording
This is a terrific performance of Messiah. Not only are the soloists all superb, but Trevor Pinnock completely contradicts the image of many period instrument performances as small-scale, scrappy affairs. Indeed, he invests the choruses with as much genuine Handelian pomp as Beecham at his most extravagant. The trumpets really blaze, and the timpani thunder, and everyone simply has a great time. A joyous performance, just right for the holiday season. --David Hurwitz
Trevor Pinnock meets with mixed success in this account of the Messiah with the English Concert & Choir and soloists Arleen Aug
Amazon.com essential recording
This is a terrific performance of Messiah. Not only are the soloists all superb, but Trevor Pinnock completely contradicts the image of many period instrument performances as small-scale, scrappy affairs. Indeed, he invests the choruses with as much genuine Handelian pomp as Beecham at his most extravagant. The trumpets really blaze, and the timpani thunder, and everyone simply has a great time. A joyous performance, just right for the holiday season. --David Hurwitz
Trevor Pinnock meets with mixed success in this account of the Messiah with the English Concert & Choir and soloists Arleen Auger, Anne Sofie von Otter, Michael Chance, Howard Crook, and John Tomlinson, recorded and released in 1988. Its strengths are the strengths of the early-music movement in general. The size and distribution of the instrumental and vocal forces are optimal, which means that textures are clear and balances apt. Rhythms are nicely pointed, though often, in Pinnock's case, not quite well enough sprung. Tempos are well chosen; for example, "All we like sheep"--which turns out to be one of the set's best numbers--is a real bourré, and Pinnock animates it in just the right way. But the performance often seems workmanlike and unemotional, weighed down in too many instances by the humdrum work of the chorus. The alto section in particular, which is half male and half female, sings timidly and is constantly swallowing its entrances. Bass soloist John Tomlinson is a further drag on the effort. He has the right idea--that there's an Italian opera hiding behind all this biblical imagery--but his cottony sound is out of place, a misguided attempt to mimic Nicolai Ghiaurov. His usable range is less than a tenth (he croaks the low G's and F-sharps), and his diction is horrible. "Thus spake the Lord" is strangled, and when, in "The trumpet shall sound" Tomlinson gets to the words "we shall be changed," one can't help wishing that he had been changed too, right before the sessions started. --Ted Libbey
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Manufacturer: Archiv Produktion
Release date: 25 October 1990
EAN: 0028942363021 UPC: 042242363024
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