Early-music superstar Christopher Hogwood views with particular disdain the frequent American custom of do-it-yourself Messiahs. “The whole purpose of having a chorus in Messiah is that it represents the public,” he says. “It sings for you. You don’t join in and spoil it. You might as well have a dance-along Nutcracker. The whole notion is immensely uncultured and a mark of sociability rather than musicality. You could just as easily have a huge Christmas party and people would be just as happy.”
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Hogwood will be in town Thursday, conducting a performance of the Messiah by the Handel and Haydn Society, whose artistic director he became in 1986. This year marks the Society’s 135th annual performance of the work, but it is the first time the Society will perform the work on period instruments and according to Handel’s own proportions, and the first time it will perform in Chicago. “We’ve drawn upon the best period-instrument performers in the country,” Hogwood says.
“And yet as much as everyone loves the work,” he says, “we’re actually very unfamiliar with it. Messiah is traditionally performed with a chorus of several hundred and an orchestra large enough to raise the roof–in a musical style that would do justice to the most pretentious moments of Elgar. Handel himself rarely expected more than 60 people to take part in his performances–and that was chorus, orchestra, and soloists combined.”
The Society performance is on Thursday at 7 PM in Orchestra Hall, 220 S. Michigan. Call 435-6666 for more information. Audience members are encouraged to bring canned goods to this concert as part of the city’s sixth annual “Sharing It” food drive to feed the hungry and the homeless during the holidays.
