“When is the best time to perform Messiah?”
“Immediately after a pandemic” is the obvious answer, and that’s exactly what The Hampstead Collective is excited about, with Monday’s performance only a few days away. The work is often performed at Christmas and Easter, and at Christmas the bonus is that the only section of dramatic narrative of the piece ties in well, from the ‘Pifa’ to the sudden appearance of the angels (with distant trumpets) and their final disappearance into the clouds – the only moment of humour in the work. But Messiah’s libretto encompasses the whole story of Christian salvation, from Isaiah to the Book of Revelation, and this summation arguably feels most appropriate at the end of the liturgical year. Although we’ve quite a wait until ‘Christ the King’ in November (‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain’), our performance is sandwiched between the last two major festivals of the calendar, Pentecost and Trinity. Rather like the anthem ‘See, see, the word is incarnate’ by Orlando Gibbons, which the church choir will sing at Evensong on Trinity I (June 6th), Messiah allows us to contemplate the liturgical year in one grand sweep. But the correct answer is of course, “any time!”.
The plan is to stream and have a distanced live audience as before