A hopeful holiday musical greeting from G. F. Handel -- and another from L. van Beethoven

HANDEL: Messiah: No. 2, Accompagnato, "Comfort ye"

Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

-- Isaiah 40:1-3

by Ken

Last night ( For Christmas Eve, we hark unto the openings of Berlioz's Childhood of Christ and Handel's Messiah") I took a stab at explaining how it came that, given this year's unusual three-day Christmas "arc," I had the idea of resurrecting a three-day musical post from Christmas 2011, and how it wasn't actually possible, as I'd first hoped, to simply paste the old posts into new blogfiles, but that that provided an opportunity to do various sorts of updating and expanding for the 2016 version.

One of the problems, with which I had to bore you but have to, just a little, is an infuriating technical incompatibility between our posts of bygone times and current ones, and in fact for the intended second and third parts of the sequence the problem has proved insurmountable -- tonight's continuation of last night's post had to be entirely typed from scratch, and I don't think tomorrow's planned resurrection of my composite performance of the whole of Part I of Messiah is going to be impossible for tomorrow's "third day" of Christmas ("Christmas observed").

As promised last night, when we listened to the opening tenor solos of Handel's Messiah and Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, including hearing both sung by the fondly remembered Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda, we're returning to the Messiah vocal opening (following the orchestral Overture, that is). Tonight, as I laid out the agenda in 2011, "I'm going to be resurrecting my account of how I first came to hear a tenor singing it singing directly and personally to me." And in addition:

As it happens, there's another musical excerpt, by coincidence or otherwise also written for tenor, which under the right circumstances can give me this same sensation of its composer reaching out -- through the agency of this singer -- and offering hopefulness. So I thought we would start out once again by hearing the two excerpts sung by the same tenor.

From the choral finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony:

Happily, happily, as his suns fly
across the heavens' splendid expanse,
run, brothers, your course,
joyfully, like a hero toward victory.

OUR HARD-WORKING TENOR WELL-WISHER TONIGHT IS --

Jon Vickers (1926-2015)

Vickers recorded both Messiah and the Beethoven Ninth Symphony twice that I know of, and in a moment we're going to hear both recordings of both our excerpts. For the record, the performances we just heard before the click-through were in both cases from the later recordings: the 1959 Messiah with Sir Thomas Beecham and the 1978 Beethoven Ninth with Lorin Maazel.


BUT FIRST, LET ME TRY TO EXPLAIN AGAIN HOW
"COMFORT YE" CAME TO MEAN SO MUCH TO ME

The 78-rpm recording of "Comfort ye" by Belfast-born tenor James Johnston (1903-1991) was an inspiration to me, but we're not going to hear it.

In a 2009 Christmas Day edition of Sunday Classics on Messiah ("'For unto us a child is born' -- the Prince of Peace"), I wrote a bit about my history with the piece as a whole and in particular the opening tenor accompagnato (or accompanied recitative), "Comfort ye." I don't know how well it conveyed what I meant, but I doubt that I can do it better, so here's what I wrote back then:

I didn't always love Messiah. Like many people, I suspect, I used to think of it as a windy old bore. Gradually I came around, but a real turning point came one day when I was visiting my friend Richard, who had a large collection of 78s and a good turntable and cartridge set up for playing them (if you've never heard 78s really well reproduced, you qouls probably be shocked at how much sound those old grooves can contain), and I got the crazy idea of listening to at least some of the first of Malcolm Sargent's four recordings of Messiah.

No sooner had we gotten through the Overture than I was stopped cold by the Northern Irish tenor James Johnston singing the first vocal number, the recitative "Comfort ye, my people." I don't know that anyone pays much attention to it. Certainly I never did. Usually you think of it as something you go through to get to the following tenor aria, "Every valley shall be exalted." Suddenly, though, Johnston was singing, on behalf of his God, directly to me! "Comfort ye," indeed. And then he was singing to me, as Jerusalem, "that her warfare is abolished, that her iniquity is pardon-èd." Whoa! And I pretty well lost it.

Now anytime I have access to a decent performance of "Comfort ye," I am readily available for having my warfare abolished and my iniquity pardon-èd. And gradually I've found more and more of Messiah speaking directly and personally to me.

As I suggested before the click-through, I've had the same sort of experience with the big tenor solo from the finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, when I've encountered the right kind of performance while in the right sort of mood -- usually one where I'm in considerable need of bucking up.

With that background, let's turn the floor back to Jon Vickers.

HANDEL: Messiah: No. 2, Accompagnato, tenor, "Comfort ye, my people"; No. 3, Air, "Every valley shall be exalted"

Accompagnato
Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

-- Isaiah 40:1-3

Air
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

--Isaiah: 40:4

Jon Vickers, tenor; Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Sir Ernest McMillan, cond. RCA-EMI, recorded c1952

Jon Vickers, tenor; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. (orch. Goossens). RCA-BMG, recorded 1959

from the finale of BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125

Happily, as his suns fly
across the heavens' splendid expanse,
run, brothers, your course,
joyfully, like a hero toward victory.

Jon Vickers, tenor; London Bach Choir, London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. Westminster-MCA-DG, recorded June 1962

Jon Vickers, tenor; Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, Cleveland Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded Oct. 13-15, 1978

A BEETHOVEN CHRISTMAS BONUS

That's pretty rotten teasing you with just that snippet of the finale of the Beethoven Ninth. So here are the complete performances of the movement from which those snippets were taken.

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125:
iv. Finale

Elisabeth Söderström, soprano; Regina Resnik, mezzo-soprano; Jon Vickers, tenor; David Ward, bass-baritone; London Bach Choir, London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. Westminster-MCA-DG, recorded June 1962

Lucia Popp, soprano; Elena Obraztsova, mezzo-soprano; Jon Vickers, tenor; Martti Talvela, bass; Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, Cleveland Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded Oct. 13-15, 1978

IN TOMORROW'S CHRISTMAS (OBSERVED) POST --

Maybe we'll actually be able to have the complete Part I of Messiah after all, now augmented with excerpts from Colin Davis's splendid first recording of the oratorio, which was MIA when I did the original version of these posts. Or maybe instead we'll resurrect a musical favorite of mine, the DWT composite complete Tchaikovsky Nutcracker -- yes, the whole darned thing, in multiple versions -- what I have described in years past as "our now-hallowed panoply of stellar performances!" Or maybe it'll be something else entirely. Until it actually happens, one never knows, does one?

UPDATE: The suspense is over! The Christmas (observed) post turned out to be "Nutcracker Redux!"

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