"Precision and Passion" could not be more apt - 13.12.06

[Concert Review: Messiah/LSO/Davis, Barbican] by Fiona Maddocks, Evening Standard, 13 Dec 06

Though written by a German with Easter in mind, Handel’s Messiah has become a Christmas fixture in English choral music.

When the audience at the Barbican last night – or most of us – rose to our feet for the Hallelujah Chorus, we were participating in the unique collective tradition of this 1742 masterpiece, written in an astounding 24 days when the composer was at his lowest ebb.

Yet I suspect uppermost in the minds of many of us was not the advent of the Newborn King as the departure of the LSO’s principal conductor, Sir Colin Davis, who now becomes president, ceding power to Valery Gergiev.

You might not think Davis the obvious man for this work, now all but reinvented by the rigours of period instrument performance. But Davis himself was a pioneer, his 1960s recording using pared down forces set the standard.

In the intervening decades, if Davis’s speeds have broadened a little, his sense of adventure is fresh as ever. Using LSO strings and a handful of essential woodwind, trumpet and drums, he mustered a performance of shapely energy, with exemplary choral singing from Tenebrae, whose boast of “precision and passion” could not be more apt.

To have Mark Padmore among the soloists was a luxury, since even with some redistribution of arias the tenor has relatively little to do. He brought particular intensity to “Thy rebuke hath broke his heart”. Susan Gritton, soprano, showed beatific simplicity in “I know that my Redeemer liveth”.

Alto Sara Mingardo and bass Alastair Miles each had moments to cherish. The strings’ tempestuous attack in the bass aria “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” had stirring and enduring force. Characteristically, Sir Colin Davis has ended this phase of his long relationship with the LSO on an imaginative high.

• To be broadcast on BBC4, Saturday 23 December, 7pm.