Okay, I missed Handel’s birthday (on February 23). Time to make amends.
Sir Thomas Beecham developed an early love for Handel, at a time when very few of his contemporaries knew more than a handful of his pieces. Certainly the operas and oratorios – with the exception of “Messiah,” which had grown fatter and fatter through years of Victorian adoration – were exceedingly scarce. Beecham despaired of this, since there was so much brilliant music, he knew, embedded within these sleeping giants.
He responded by not only reviving some of the oratorios, in heavily reworked, though for the most part musically sensitive editions, he also arranged choice Handelian morsels into original ballet and concert suites. In doing so, he introduced audiences to much worthy music, which had previously been known only to scholars and specialists.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll listen to Beecham’s at times eccentric, though generally delightful recordings. Alongside the trademark charm of the conductor’s approach comes a thrilling virtuosity in some of the faster music, nowhere better demonstrated than in a 1932 recording of something Beecham called “The Origin of Design,” a suite de ballet distilled from the operas “Ariodante” “Terpsichore,” “Il pastor fido,” “Giulio Cesare,” and “Rinaldo.”
In approaching those oratorios he ventured to present whole (or something like it), Beecham was not only NOT above tinkering with the orchestration, he would toss out entire sections and rearrange mercilessly, all with the aim of cooking up a digestible evening of music which the general public might otherwise just as happily left in the freezer. At its most gauche, Beecham’s method could result in something like his last recording of Handel’s “Messiah,” which he set down in 1959. The re-orchestration was commissioned from Sir Eugene Goossens and features ample cymbal crashes and other eccentricities, which seem somehow to actual sap some of the excitement out of the original music.
Beecham defended his padded “Messiah,” not only pointing to the composer’s documented delight in great demonstrations of sound, but also stating his fear that without some effort along the lines he’d undertaken, the greater portion of Handel’s output would remain unplayed – in his words, “possibly to the satisfaction of armchair purists, but hardly to the advantage of the keenly alive and enquiring concertgoer.”
Despite taking great liberties, Beecham’s recording of Handel’s “Solomon,” set down in 1955-1956, is, in a word, gorgeous. It’s nowhere near what Handel conceived – there’s a huge chunk taken out of the middle, with some of the displaced numbers given refuge in wholly unrelated parts of the oratorio; Solomon, a role generally undertaken these days by a countertenor is assigned to a baritone; the cymbal crashes that disfigure Beecham’s “Messiah” turn up here, as well, but somehow, if one allows oneself to succumb to the Beecham magic, none of it is truly bothersome. In fact, the recording could be deemed an unalloyed delight. It’s not something you’d want as your only “Solomon,” yet it could be the recording of the work you return to the most.
I hope you’ll join me for “Handeling Beecham” – Sir Thomas Beecham conducts Handel – this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
