The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, the NFM Choir (Poland) and soloists perform Handel's "Messiah" in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv

Photo: Maxim Reider

The 2017 Vocal Fantasy, hosted by the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, followed the vision of the late Shimon Bigelman, who founded the festival in 2012. The six concerts, a celebration of choirs and voices taking place from July 12th to15th 2017 and with the endorsement of the Jerusalem Development Authority, was dedicated to Shimon Bigelman’s memory.

The event opening the festival (Jerusalem July 12th and closing it in Tel Aviv July 15th) was Georg Frideric Händel’s “Messiah”. Handel wrote the original version of “Messiah” in three to four weeks. Premiered in Dublin to an audience of 700 people on April 13th 1742, women were requested to wear dresses without hoops and men to leave swords at home in order to “make room for more company”. Conducting the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, the NFM Choir (Wrocław, Poland; artistic director Agnieszka Frankow-Żelazny) and soloists was JBO founder and musical director Maestro David Shemer. The festival’s visiting choir from Poland, singing in clear, British English, offered a careful blend of rich, well-anchored voices, coloring and contrasted gestures, highlighting key words, responding to orchestral textures and giving pleasing articulacy to the complexities of fugal sections as it propelled the work forward with impact and its uplifting messages.  Characterizing tenor Eitan Drori’s performance were his acute awareness of each shade of meaning, his timing and word-painting, as he found new expression for each turn of the text and its emotions. His is a large, lustrous tenor voice, maneuvered however with tenderness in the opening “Comfort ye”, then with hurtling fire to “laugh them to scorn” or “dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”. Bristling with presence and descriptiveness, authority and contrast, bass-baritone Assaf Levitin presented his arias in definite colours, lending a keen sense of contrast to such passages as “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” and triumph and joyousness in “The trumpet shall sound”, in which he was joined by Yuval Shapira’s fine handling of the natural trumpet. Soprano Hadas Faran Asia gave convincing balance to the solo soprano’s richly varied role of recounting the story and of emotional response to it - joyous and lyrical responses and the sense of awe of Händel’s own faith, as in her gently ornamented and dynamically varied singing of “I know that my Redeemer liveth”. Zlata Hershberg, her lower register occasionally obscured by the orchestra, wove peace and melodiousness into idyllic texts, whipping up the drama and tension as she sang of Jesus who “hid not His face from shame and spitting” in “He was despised”.

There was much buoyant- and beautifully shaped playing on the part of the instrumentalists and plenty of close communication between them and choir and soloists. With its drones, the sweetly bucolic and dreamy "Pastoral Symphony" (entitled Pifa) set the scene for the shepherds’ arrival in the fields. First violinist Noam Schuss delighted audiences with her ever well-spoken, lucid- and unmannered obligato playing.

And to the pinnacle of Händel’s “Messiah”, the Hallelujah Chorus, (for which audiences in some locations still rise to their feet in honour of this musical credo). On completing his writing of the piece which would take its place in history as the "Hallelujah Chorus", the composer, with tears streaming down his face cried out to his servant "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself." The festival audiences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv remained seated for the Hallelujah Chorus, but they certainly rose to their feet, shouted and whistled in appreciation at the conclusion of the majestic and exciting performance. The fact remains that this epic masterpiece is as fresh and inspiring as ever, still awing listeners 250 years after the composer’s death.

 

The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra and vocal soloists perform three of Handel's Chandos Anthems

The great German Baroque composer Georg Frideric Händel (1685-1769) arrived in England in 1712, establishing Britain as his new home and winning great popularity and respect among the concert-going public there. It was in 1717 that Henry James Brydges, the first Duke of Chandos, took him into his employ at Cannons, the Duke’s palatial mansion near London.  There Händel became chapel master, with another German, Dr. Johann Christoph Pepusch serving as composer-in-residence.  A flautist and an extravagant patron of the arts, the Duke kept a fine team of over 20 musicians at Canons, among them Francesco Scarlatti (Alessandro’s brother) and Johann Christoph Bach, J.S.Bach’s cousin. Händel would certainly have played the organ in the Church of St. Lawrence on the Cannons estate and the eleven Chandos Anthems, three of which were performed on December 31^st 2015 at the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra’s third subscription concert of the 2015-2016 season in the Mary Nathaniel Golden Hall of  Friendship, the Jerusalem International YMCA, would surely have been performed in this dramatic setting, its walls and ceilings covered with frescoes of biblical scenes painted by the most celebrated artists of the day.

Händel knew the Bible well, choosing texts based on the Psalms for the Chandos Anthems, allowing each text to inspire him with the wealth of musical ideas that go to make up this collection. In his program notes, Maestro David Shemer, founder and musical director of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, talks of the unusual scoring of the hymns - works for three voices and for six and “scored for an ensemble of violins and basso continuo”, bassoon and one oboe, with no violas in the instrumental group and no alto voice in the vocal ensemble. Shemer reminds his listeners that the Chandos Anthems preceded the composer’s oratorios, “the musical genre that brought Händel so much fame”.

In inverse chronology but to whet audience members’ appetite with a work more familiar to them, the concert opened with the Overture to Händel’s oratorio “Judas Maccabaeus” (1746), a dramatic overture in the French style.  Presenting the two-part overture, refined, majestic and energizing in its royal pomp, the JBO players set the scene for the inspiring Händel program.

The three singers performing the solos and duets, but also forming the choir in the program comprising three of the Chandos Anthems – “I will magnify Thee” Anthem V HWV 250a, “As pants the hart for cooling springs” Anthem VI HWV 251a and “O be joyful in the Lord” Anthem I HWV 246, were Hadas Faran Asia-soprano, Doron Florentin-tenor and Yair Polishook-bass.  The three Israeli singers gave engaging performances, celebrating the wealth of contrapuntal and timbral interest of the choruses. As to the works’ solos and duets, these pieces gave the audience time to ponder the unique contribution of each singer: laying her operatic persona aside, Faran Asia related to the texts with devotional empathy and warmth, with flowing easeful and melismatic melodic lines, giving attention to the instrumental and vocal expression happening around her. Contending splendidly with the variety and demands of the tenor role, Florentin, his voice aggregating color and consistency, was expressive and active in narrating the text, relating to such musical/textual features as the vibrant play of mood changes and dissonances in “The Lord preserveth” (Anthem VI). Polishook’s musicality and understanding of the Baroque genre are well known; his addressing the importance of a solid base to the vocal ensembles of the anthems, his highlighting of a key phrase here and there and his signature quality of relating a text in its full meaning contributed much to the performance. The oboe and bassoon parts, the linchpin of the Chandos Anthems and an essential element of their expressive aspect, were performed adeptly by Tal Levin and Gilat Rotkop, as in their duet in the opening duet of “As pants the hart for cooling springs”. In the latter anthem, singers and orchestra brought a tear to the eye in their conveying of the anthem’s fragility, its grief and drama; the final chorus “Put thy trust in God” is written in opulent contrapuntal musical language of such a high order that one is at a loss to focus on all voices, let alone on some. These works bristle with superb instrumental writing. In their fresh, energetic and sensitive reading of the beautiful, intimate settings of liturgical texts, whose beauty does not fall from that of Händel’s oratorios, the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, conducted by David Shemer, gave listeners a thrilling opportunity to hear these rarely-heard works splendidly performed .