San Francisco Classical Voice

Christophers is an English conductor best known as director of The Sixteen, a chamber choir whose "home turf" is the Renaissance, but which also sings a great deal of later music. His approach to Messiah was astute. To begin with, he realized that for a Davies audience, he had best cut something. Sunday's 2 p.m. performance ended at 4:30 almost on the nose. Nothing went missing in Part 1 apart from the "B" section of the pifa, better known as the "Pastoral Symphony." Part 2, on the other hand, shed several short numbers. "Let all the Angels of God" was gone; so were "Thou art gone up on High" and "The Lord Gave the Word." The only other cut was the "B" section and da capo of "The Trumpet shall sound," to which good riddance. The Symphony staff, it seemed to me, did their part in keeping the total time down by making the interval significantly shorter than usual.

Christophers was at his best with the choir, shaping the lines constantly with his hands and getting good phrasing out of the singers. I don't know to what extent he tried to get the same out of the orchestra, but it was evident that either they'd been told to keep it down, or else they'd just done what most "modern" players do when confronted with an "early-music" conductor: thin down the vibrato, play all trills from the upper note, articulate absolutely everything, and above all, don't draw attention to yourself. What makes this sad is that it's not in the least how contemporary "period-instrument" musicians play. It's a caricature of "historical performance" even 25 years ago, and much more pedantic than the supposed pedants are.

Christophers had obviously thought about balances a good deal. The strings were eight first violins, six seconds, four violas, four cellos, and two basses, but they weren't all used all the time. In most of the arias, the lower strings were cut to two violas, two cellos, and one bass, and in at least a couple of the "unison violin" arias (firsts and seconds playing the same part, and no violas), the last stand of the second violins sat out, so that there were 12 players on the one part.

There were subtler instrumental adjustments, too. In "Glory to God," the first time the trumpets appear, Christophers had them offstage, the stage-right-side doors opening so that they could see him and be heard, but mutedly. More unusual yet was Christophers' addition of a bassoon to the continuo. He did this not just in the choruses, where the bassoon might seem an obvious counterpart to the oboes, but also in arias that were otherwise string-only. It worked remarkably well, somewhat to my surprise, adding depth of color to the bass line without standing out particularly as a "woodwind sound" in a string context. (In fact, this effect turns out to be Handel's own, in the autograph score, but I don't think I've seen it actually applied before.)

The soloists were good, two of them excellent. The real find was tenor James Gilchrist, who (according to his bio) was a doctor until taking up singing full-time less than a decade ago. His is a beautiful tenor voice, powerful when power is needed, and meltingly sweet and soft, also when needed. He startled me in his opening "Comfort ye," first ornamenting "Comfort ye, my people" in the very first phrase, then holding out the fermata on the next "Comfort ye" for what seemed an impossible length of time. The Second Part sequence beginning "Thy rebuke hath broken his heart" was uncommonly moving, and yet "Thou shalt break them" had all the furor anyone could want.

Soprano Carolyn Sampson has a silvery, true soprano that nonetheless has heft enough in it for Davies. Her "Rejoice greatly" was terrific, full of quicksilver coloratura that she tossed off without evident struggle. Her "I know that my Redeemer liveth" was more than that, though. I had been thinking of it as a beautiful but slightly calculated performance until the last repetition of those words, where she pared down her sound to the bare minimum, singing sotto voce as though she were understanding the lines for the first time. It was extraordinary.

Daniel Taylor, countertenor, took the alto solos (including "But who may abide"). I anticipated balance troubles, but there were few, largely because Christophers was careful about things like the middle bits of "But who may abide" and "He was despised." But these are things that shouldn't be underplayed, and there was an air of caution in the strings whenever Taylor was singing that was disconcerting. He was never drowned out, but there seemed to be constant fear that he might be. Nonetheless, "O Death, where is thy sting?", where Taylor was in duet with Gilchrist, was marvelous: two soft and sweet voices together. Bass Eric Owens made a powerful sound in stentorian mode, a seductive one in piano, but his passage-work was messy in "Thus Saith the Lord," and later in "Why do the nations."

The trumpets got to come onstage in earnest for "Hallelujah!" and "Worthy is the Lamb," and the cumulative effect was grand. It's tempting to say that that is really all you want in a Messiah, but it isn't so. You want the tenderness and the sorrow as well as the glory and the splendor. And most of it all was there.