Multicultural music

I’m sure the first time I heard Messiah by G. F. Handel was when I was in middle school and my older brother was in the choir. They didn’t perform the whole thing, but certainly a great deal of it, more than I wanted to tolerate sitting on gymnasium bleacher seats. That gymnasium was at the college where my parents met. It was also the college that my high school choral director graduated from. The high school choir traveled for three hours to join the college’s choir and several other choirs, the orchestra (from the college?), and soloists. A year or two later I was in the high school and in the choir. I sang bass and my brother sang tenor. And we did Messiah. I learned the bass part of many of the choruses. We went back to the same little college gymnasium. The rest of the family stayed at the family farm about 25 miles away (which is why my dad attended that college). They came to the performance on Sunday afternoon. In college the choir (which I was in) Christmas Concert was usually one of Lessons and Carols. One year we sang Messiah in which each solo was sung by a different vocal student. A few years after college, when I was settled in the Detroit area, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra did a Messiah sing-along. I took my score (of course by then I had my own) and joined in. There was one director for the orchestra and one for the audience. I think I got most of the florid 16th notes and was amused by some of the high school men around me who managed only the broad outline of the convoluted passages. So, of course, I had a recording (on LP!) of Messiah, though not of me in the choir. I played it each December. Then my musical tastes changed and I found music of Handel’s era (early 1700s) mostly boring. I much prefer classical music of the last 150 years. So I had enough Messiah in what came across the radio in December, which was rarely the whole thing. One of the advantages of living near Detroit is being able to hear CBC Radio, the national radio service of Canada. I usually listen to the classical hour of the early afternoon program Shift hosted by Tom Allen. The second part of the program is popular music and I turn back to the Detroit station. A couple weeks ago Allen talked about and played an excerpt of Messiah/Complex produced by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Against the Grain Theatre. This sounded intriguing, so last evening I watched and listened to it. The video is less than 80 minutes, so they didn’t do the whole piece (which can take two hours), though they did the most famous parts. What they did is really cool and excellently done. The cool part is they included soloists from across Canada’s diversity – white, black, and indigenous, gay and Arab. Each soloist sang in their native language and in their native setting. While the music was Handel’s in many cases the words were not. The orchestra played the overture from their home stage in Toronto, masked and distanced and with wind instruments enclosed in plexiglass. I’m sure the soloists recorded their parts in a recording studio somewhere. The choirs, also masked (or outside) and distanced, sang from or were recorded in their home church or space. The first part after the overture is the tenor solos “Comfort Ye” and “Every Valley.” During the first he was shown singing beside the inlet on the north side of Vancouver and during the second he was in the gay neighborhood (obvious from the rainbow street crossings). The bass solo that includes the words “For he is like a refiner’s fire” we see images of a refinery and of a man building a bonfire. The solo “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain” was sung by an indigenous woman in her native language with a backdrop of the Yukon Rockies. Her words were retranslated into English for subtitles. We didn’t get the old English words still sometimes used by the Church, instead we got a fresher text: “Share the news from the highest mountain.” The creator is here. I didn’t always keep track of which solo or chorus was sung in which location. The locations included a provincial park in Manitoba with lots of tall trees, more mountains visible from a hilltop in Nunavut, and Lake Louise near Banff, Alberta. A Muslim (I think) woman in Montreal sang in French. She changed words a bit to “a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” The images showed an older woman at a prayer rug. On the coast of Labrador a woman sang in her native language. I was getting a bit tired of the images of slow motion feet walking over the scrub, then I realized the words were “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace.” A black woman sang “Why do the nations so furiously rage together” from Graffiti Alley in Toronto. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir sang the Hallelujah Chorus on the streets of Toronto outside the orchestra’s home concert hall. An indigenous woman in Yellowknife, Alberta sang in her native language and the retranslated words were “I know my creator lives.” She had a campfire and tent and performed some of her people’s rituals. To the music of “The trumpet shall sound” and we will be raised incorruptible the bass soloist and his father visit the hockey rink of his youth, a time that is shown through family videos. A woman singing in Arabic with an introduction not by Handel visits the ruins of a church in which the walls are intact, though the roof is gone. The final chorus is is sung by a choir in Halifax. This was the only time that I was annoyed with the otherwise excellent camera work. In this case I felt the cameras moved around the singers a bit too much and too quickly. Overall this is an excellent performance of parts of Messiah. The scenery is spectacular, as is the photography. It is well worth the time to watch. One can watch for free (or donate to the theater) though I found navigating the website confusing, as in I download a ticket, then wondered what do I do with it. The program will be online through January 7.