Last night's Handel Fireworks Celebration at Grace Cathedral, the
final program in the current season of the American Bach Soloists,
provided a sobering lesson in music history. The lesson was a reminder
of just how incidental music was in the eighteenth century. In
just about every social setting in which music was performed, that
performance was as much in the background as the architecture and
furnishings of the space in which it took place. The sort of attentive
listening that we bring to any performance of music today played little,
if any, part in George Frideric Handel's social context. As far as his
"consumers" were concerned, little mattered beyond questions of how he
should be fairly compensated for his efforts.
The two halves
of last night's program featured two different incidental settings. The
first half was devoted to religious ceremony, consisting of the first
of four anthems composed for the coronation of George II in Westminster
Abbey ("Zadok the Priest," HWV 258) and the cantata setting of Psalm 112
Laudate, pueri, Dominum (HWV 237), composed while Handel was in Rome in 1707. The second half then turned to the secular social settings of the Water Music (the second and third suites, HWV 349 and 350) and the Music for the Royal Fireworks (HWV 351), with "fireworks" provided in the form of a laser light show.
Incidental
as all that music may be, it can still hold up to serious listening,
particularly in the hands of an ensemble like the American Bach
Soloists, which gives so much attention to the instruments they play and
the performance practices engaged to play them. My first opportunity
to hear these performers reminded me of how little attention I had given
to the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach and inspired me to do
something about this major gap in my listening experience. However, in
order to listen to this ensemble, one must first hear them; and
in this respect both they and Handel had to suffer the indignities of an
acoustic cavern in which any effort at nuance was almost immediately
rendered as auditory mush. Grace Cathedral may have been the right
setting to invoke the memory of Westminster Abbey in 1727; but, as soon
as the Grace Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys intoned the first words of
Handel's anthem, it became impossible to hear any instruments other
than the timpani and occasionally the trumpets. Balance improved
somewhat during the cantata, but only after it was clear that an
amplification system had been brought into play.
The Bay Area has
earned a reputation for according both respect and love to Handel's
music. One has only to consider the pride of place given to the
Philharmonia Baroque by my fellow Examiner, Cindy Warner, in her
capacity as SF Opera Examiner. Next week three of those coronation anthems (including "Zadok the Priest") will be performed by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the perceptive direction of Bernard Labadie, who provided such stimulating interpretations of Joseph Haydn last season.
Davies Symphony Hall may seat more people than Grace Cathedral, but it
does not suffocate the sound of music with its reverberations. It is
encouraging to know that we shall not have to wait very long for Handel
to get a performance in a space where his music will be far more than
incidental.
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