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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 A gigantic, hideously beautiful monstrosity Jan 01, 2010
"ba·roque: ... 3. Extravagant, complex, or bizarre, especially in ornamentation"
What happens when you add a double orchestra, a gigantic brass section, and inexplicably, several large gongs to a Messiah performance? You get a beautiful, hideously ornate work that is truly "Baroque." Think the original Messiah score is too anemic? Add instrumental lines, more solo instruments, and plenty of cymbals!
Compared with my touchstone Messiah recording (the Telarc recording by Pearlman and the Boston Baroque) this performance is ponderous and exaggerated, like how I'd imagine Crème brûlée would taste if prepared by Kull the Conqueror. However, there is nothing quite like the experience of listening to a double chorus/brass belt out the Halleujah Chorus at full volume while feeling the walls shake from the random insertions of percussion that Beecham seems to see fit to add to the score.
Once a year, I still enjoy pulling this recording out to terrify my friends. This work is not be listened to by true Baroque purists. My wife still curls up into the fetal position when she hears this recording start up. But I must confess, I do truly adore this recording, if nothing else than for the camp value.
I Love This Recording Oct 26, 2009
This is my favorite version of The Messiah. We own several different versions, but this is the only one anyone in my family listens to. I have this recording on vintage vinyl and CD, but cannot keep my family from liberally using the discs and I can never find it when I want it. I will have to buy another that is specifically for my own use. It is well worth having more than one copy.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
UN-PC MAGIC May 26, 2009
Just how un-PC can you get? It would be hard to get much further out of line with period performance thinking than these CDs of Messiah. Re-orchestrations (by Eugene Goossens) supplement the Handelian orchestra with a full complement of horns, trombones, doubled woodwind (including piccolo), a full string section (including a well-upholstered double-bass section) and a batterie of percussion. The soloists are led by a heldentenor (one of the finest post-war heldentenors, in fact) in full flight. Tempi are often slow by today's standards. There is not a vocal decoration in sight. And the whole enterprise is led by a man who plundered his family's substantial wealth to further his conducting ambitions, even to the extent of founding two separate London orchestras.
But I adore it. That plunderer is a conjurer in the shape, of course, of Tommy Beecham. And the magic he weaves around a work he loved dearly should be heard by all lovers of great music and great music-making. It's interesting that Mozart's arrangement of Messiah should be politically acceptable today, but this sort of thing not. I would certainly argue that all the Goosens/Beecham re-orchestration here is just as true if not truer to the spirit of Handel as Mozart was. And the sounds they make are sometimes surprisingly delicate, often rich and luminous, frequently glorious and always enlivened and enlightened by Sir Thomas' conducting - even where speeds are significantly slower than we've become accustomed to.
As for the singers, they are a vintage 1959 set. Jon Vickers is the aforementioned heldentenor and he acquits himself with great distinction in a role apparently so far from his usual fach. OK, so there's none of the decoration and vocal gymnastics we've come to expect in Handel, but - particularly by the time we reach the sequence of `Thy rebuke hath broken his heart', `Behold and see', `He was cut off' and `But thou didst not leave' - he provides a typically intense and deeply moving performance. Jennifer Vyvyan, too, is a familiar voice from that period (especially as part of the Britten/Aldeburgh rep.) and brings her clarity and pearly brilliance to the Christmas sequence as well as a simplicity of utterance to match the great Isobel Baillie in `I know that my Redeemer liveth'. Monica Sinclair is another stalwart of the period: her contralto tone may seem a little heavy by modern standards, especially if compared to a counter-tenor, but a lifetime's experience in singing Messiah up and down the country meant she knew just how to get the most out of each of her numbers and is most affecting in `He was despised'. Giorgio Tozzi is a real bass and fits perfectly into this group. Choir and orchestra are Beecham's own Royal Philharmonic and a delight is guaranteed throughout for all but the most purist of Period Performance addicts. Of course I wouldn't want to be without the Hogwood or Parrott or Christophers performance. But I definitely wouldn't want to be without this one, too.
Beecham's Great Legacy! Mar 29, 2009
Hell, this is a great performance and a great interpretation. Beecham pitches this to people, and I find that refreshing. He put some all stars in place and gave them a setting with his great orchestra, choir, and conducting. And he produced a mammoth performance, possibly the best known performance in the English speaking world. I cut my teeth on this classic performance. Only later did I find out there were others. (I'll get to that in a moment.) I don't know where I've been a lot of my life to have missed so much of Beecham's conducting. After listening to his performance of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique with the National French Radio Orchestra -- and finding out where Colin Davis learned to conduct that symphony (listen to it if you don't believe it) 15 or so years before Davis' famous performance with the Concertgebouw came out -- and many other of the amazing performances (Haydn, Bizet, etc.) he cut and left for us to discover later (a la moi!), I'm rather glad this creative, brilliant guy was around. People in his generation thought so too!
Beecham's Messiah is great listening, but there is also another one out there that deserves a perch among the better Messiahs, maybe along side Sir Thomas'. Karl Richter's recording with the London Philharmonic is very notable, but practically unknown, probably because this talented conductor died in 1981 at the age of 54. One of the great baroque conductors of all time, Richter was a product of the Leipzig music tradition (as in Bach home, JS that is!) being born in Bach's home town and actually serving in the same positions as Bach at St Thomas Church before he became professor of music at a Munich Conservatory and formed his famous Munich Bach Orchestra and Choir that became famous in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. The man was a legend in Leipzig's expresivo conducting and has turned in some scintillating performances of Handel. (I have a great performance of Handel's Samson by him!)
DG recorded this great performance with the LPO and Thomas McIntyre, Stuart Burrows, Helen Donath, and Anna Reynolds with the John Aldis Choir. Ladies and Gentlemen, do yourself a favor and hear this great performance by a man whose conducting of Handel sounds like he lived with him. And in certain ways he did. He has the LPO sounding like a large chamber orchestra. And with out conceding to period piece sterility, he maintained intelligent musicality with great integrity.
Now Richter is recorded on a number of labels as a harpsichordist, organist, choirmaster, and conductor. (You may want to read my review of his performance of the Brahms German Requiem with the National Frence Radio Orchestra.) He was great at most things, and very gifted. Get some of his stuff with that great Munich Bach Orchestra and Choir. And listen to this Messiah. (By the way, he recorded Messiah in both English and auf Deutsch! Look under Music/Karl Richter/Handel on Amazon.com to find it!)
When you listen to Beecham's and to Richter's, you will have worthy fodder for listening many times. It's just great music! Get them!
0 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 This is the version of Messiah on which I "cut my teeth" as a teenager Jan 11, 2009
and for a long time I couldn't understand why it sounded like the work of a Victorian composer trying to imitate a Baroque one, whereas most recordings from the same era of Bach oratorios (however boring they sound to me now) at least sounded as though they belonged to their period. The LP version of Beecham's Messiah was sumptuously presented (I still have it) and the singing and orchestral playing are, as you would expect from Beecham, of a very high quality, but quite frankly I never want to hear it again. I remember the choruses being so loud I had to turn the sound down, and then turn it up again for the solo singing.
As a demonstration of the boring quality of Handel singing in the days of this recording, I used to know a young woman (born in Latvia) who had the same vocal range as Kathleen Ferrier, and she sang for me the aria He Was Despised. Naturally she sang it much as Ferrier did. She then told me that as far as she was concerned if you took away the words you landed up with nothing worthwhile. I was shocked that someone lucky enough to be able to sing Handel could feel this way. If she is still around (and she should be; she'd be in her sixties at most) I bet she has changed her mind. Since this recording there have been plenty of conductors who have redressed the balance. Many have shown that you can have grandeur without too big a choir and orchestra.
This set should be consigned to oblivion, if only because it leaves prosperity with a bad impression of an otherwise very good conductor.
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