A Messiah for Quakers
A review of the English National Opera's Messiah
Half way through the first act of the English National Opera’s new staged version of Handel’s Messiah at the London Coliseum, I thought ‘This is a Messiah for Quakers!’ As the chorus sang “Unto us a son is given”, the backdrop of a classical picture of the newborn Christ pixellated in to hundreds of tiny pictures of other children. This seemed to me to be the essential message of the production, directed by Deborah Warner (whom I have since read is a Quaker) to elevate (rather than reduce) the life of Christ, as revealed in the words of the Bible set to the music of Handel, to a human level.
Of course, staged versions of usually static choral works are not to everyone’s taste. ‘I found all that rushing around very distracting’, said the man in front of me in the interval coffee queue. But Messiah is one of the most performed classical works, and between December and Easter, there are traditional performances (four singers standing on front of an orchestra and/or chorus), in venues from small community centre through to the Albert Hall. Staged versions can make you see and hear music you know well with fresh eyes and ears. This production does not make the oratorio into a narrative, more into a reflection on each phase in life, our own lives as well as the life of Christ.
The curtain rises on a set of people doing day-to-day things: an office with two people working at computers, a woman ironing, a young woman watching television, as the tenor John Mark Ainsley sings ‘Comfort ye, my people’. Overexcited parents watch children perform a nativity play in the nativity scene ‘There were shepherds in the field abiding’. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ is sung from a hospital bed by a terminally ill woman. A fast forward film of people on an station escalator is the backdrop to ‘All we like sheep’. This could all be rather clichéd ‘all twenty-first-century life is lonely, Godless and awful’, but there is no sense of that: there are acts of love and humanity throughout: a flatmate brings a cup of tea to the TV-watching woman, two nurses minister to the dying woman; as the chorus gather for the Hallelujah chorus, they greet each other like old friends.
The final scene is as near to a Quaker meeting as I have ever seen on a stage, and made me feel just as I do when a good, grounded Meeting for Worship comes to an end. The ENO Chorus (on fine form as usual) augmented by members of the local Westminster community, sing the ‘Amen’ as a small boy walked around shaking each one by the hand.
Of the soloists, I especially enjoyed the performance of Catherine Wyn Jones, the alto, who brought great depth all her arias. I was less convinced by the bass, Brindley Sherratt, who seemed like a particularly persistent evangelist, especially in ‘Why do the nations so furiously rage together’.
I was intensely moved throughout this work which I thought I knew really well. By the time you read this, this limited run will have finished. It has been captured for posterity and broadcast, rather bizarrely, on radio (you might still be able to catch it on the BBC Listen Again service). But on radio, without the staging, it is just another Messiah. I hope that the ENO can be persuaded to revive this production, and the BBC to televise it, so a wider audience gets a chance to look afresh at Messiah.
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