JOSHUA
CHORAL ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO
If I have one overall complaint about the Basically Bach performance of the work, it is that conductor and music director Daniel V. Robinson did not evoke much in the way of Handelian spirit or energy. There should be a bouncy liveliness to Handel that was largely missing from Robinson’s often heavy-handed approach. (One wonders what a master Handelian such as City Musick’s Elaine Scott Banks might do with this score.) Still, Robinson had done his homework and knew his material quite well. He managed to keep his forces together, even if they moved along much too slowly for my taste and often with a monotone sense of the work’s drama. Occasionally some string solo playing was out of tune, and Nancy Wilson, the orchestra’s usual concertmaster, was missing. Yet the overall string and wind sound was quite good, even if orchestral string trills were rarely uniform. The brasses in particular were of a far better quality than in most past period-instrument performances in Chicago, although there were still some tentative trumpet moments.
