Oratorio? Nay, OratoriNO

This past Thursday evening, I attended the Minnesota Orchestra's performance of Handel's Messiah at The Cathedral in Saint Paul. It'd been touted from different sources as a "must see" and "a great holiday tradition". I'm not really sure personally how The Messiah started getting tied to Christmas. It was written for Easter and looking at the words that they're singing you can tell it's very Easter oriented. But anyways, after a refreshing jog through the snow and full of pizza, Tacy and I arrived in our seats right when the performance began.

There were four soloists who performed, a tenor, bass, mezzo and soprano. The tenor guy, was by far the best. When he was standing up front, even when he wasn't singing he was portraying this extremely confident vibe and he was very animated and articulate in his singing.

The mezzo girl was...well, odd I guess. Part of the reason, we agreed, was that her voice didn't seem to match her body. She's a small framed blonde girl singing a very low part. Tacy said it sounds like she was making her "froggy voice", which is the voice you make when you want to sound operatic and don't really have the voice for it.

The other two, soprano and bass, were both good, but nothing remarkable.

Being unfamiliar with Handel, other than the Hallelujah chorus, I was expecting large sweeping melodies and intricate harmonies and a lush, rich sound. I was unfortunately disappointed. The whole Messiah is a repetitive jumble. And while it may partly have been due to bad acoustics in the Cathedral, the orchestra sounded thin. Give me Beethoven or Dvorák any day over this.

I can't complain too much though. I'm glad I went. It was definitely an experience worth having and I had a good time. Thanks Tacy for sticking through it.