HAENDEL
Messiah
Concert presentation by Philippe Albèra at 6.45 pm
Handel's Messiah is, for very good reasons, one of the most beautiful and famous works in the Western musical heritage. Gli Angeli Genève performs it once or twice a year in December at the Victoria Hall, with a marvellous line-up of vocal soloists led this year by Véronique Gens, and we musicians always return to it fascinated and wondering how such a succession of hit pieces, and a libretto made up of such disparate extracts from the first English translations of the Bible, can together form such a perfect and intangible whole. It may be tempting to reduce the work to the best-known Hallelujah in history, or to a few of the most sung arias and choruses in the world, but it is in the exceptional quality of its structure, in the intelligence with which Jenkins and Handel manage to recount the whole life of Christ in just 140 minutes, and in the resulting synthesis of an entire liturgical year of praise and religious hymns, that the secret of the eternal success of the Oratorio of oratorios, of the King of Kings, lies.