Music
Pinchgut Opera’s new realisation of Handel’s Messiah strips it back to its first scoring in 1742 – and it is an undiluted joy. By Harriet Cunningham.
Pinchgut Opera’s remarkabe new version of Messiah
Google “Handel’s Messiah” and you are guaranteed to find a performance near you in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It will probably feature a massed choir of keen amateur singers who have been rehearsing for months. The performance will almost certainly be by turns loud, chaotic and uplifting.
It wasn’t always so. The first performance of Messiah took place at Neale’s Musick Hall on Fishamble Street in Dublin, Ireland, in 1742. According to musicologist Donald Burrows, the debut performance of Messiah was put together at the tail end of a highly successful tour, using a modest chorus and orchestra of professional musicians assembled from local cathedral choirs and ensembles.
The numbers onstage for Pinchgut Opera’s first presentation of Handel’s Messiah are modelled on the Dublin premiere. That means an orchestra of strings, harpsichord and organ, with a pair of trumpets and some drums for moments of high drama, and a choir of 12 individuals, singing three to a part. You could regard it as the OG Messiah, the version from which three centuries of performances have grown. But, as Pinchgut’s artistic director, Erin Helyard, notes in the program, in Handel’s time the concept of a definitive work was far from established. After all, performance is creation, so every performance is a new version.
Pinchgut’s new version is remarkable.
Helyard and the creative team – which includes lighting designer and regular collaborator Damien Cooper – take on the responsibility of this musical and social juggernaut with renewed focus and a sprinkling of theatre. The 12 singers are ranged across the stage, with a solid curved wall behind them. There is a circular cut-out in the centre that becomes a lens, directing light through stage haze to give soloists a foggy halo.
The musicians of the Orchestra of the Antipodes are all practitioners of historically informed performance, using period instruments or replicas and interpreting the score with the context of contemporary techniques and musical fashions. This approach, along with the pared-back instrumentation, reveals how demanding the vocal writing is, how complex the counterpoint, how remote the harmonies and ultimately, how virtuosic this music can be.
The opening of the “Sinfony”, for example, is heavy with foreboding, but the dark and ponderous sound gives way to something lighter and more refined in the da capo, when concertmaster Matthew Greco breaks into festoons of ornamentation, a glittering concertino to set us on our way.
Conducting from the harpsichord, Helyard is all galvanising energy and vision. His choice of tempi is uncompromising and sometimes a little terrifying. For example, he sets in motion the bitter chorus “He trusted in God that He might deliver Him…” at a pace that makes me lean forward in my seat. Will they keep up with him and fit together all the intricate pieces of Handel’s counterpoint? They do.
All 12 choristers play a role individually and collectively. The first words, “Comfort Ye”, go to tenor soloist Jacob Lawrence, who delivers God’s reassuring message with warmth, looking after every note of “Ev’ry Valley”. Bass soloist Edward Grint shakes the heavens and the earth with stern vigour. Alto Hannah Fraser brings the good tidings, and the crystalline voice of soprano Miriam Allan, as the angelic host reassuring Bethlehem’s flock-watching shepherds, is suitably ethereal.
At the heart of Messiah are the great choruses, and anticipating their arrival is part of the communal listening experience. Andrew O’Connor leads us with stentorian tones out of the land of the shadow of death, and we know we are only moments away from the big announcement. “For unto us a child is born” is the first big forte of the performance, all 12 singers coming together to shout “And his name shall be called Wonderful…” It is a glorious tutti sound, its drama underlined by a sudden shift in lighting to warm gold.
“He was despised and rejected” and “I know my Redeemer liveth” are the two arias that carry the emotional weight of the Messiah. Alto Ashlyn Timms takes on the first of these, a mournful and bitter account of Christ’s suffering as prophesised by Isaiah, with noble grace. The second goes to Miriam Allan, who sings, backlit, with the look and sound of beatific transcendence.
Myriam Arbouz, whose fine soprano is more textured than Allan’s, makes a heart-rending drama of the Passion in “But Thou dost not leave His soul in hell…”. Louis Hurley, meanwhile, keeps the argument moving through his agile and responsive accompagnato passages. Freddy Shaw – who first appeared with Pinchgut as a boy treble – brings an urgent thrill to the bass aria “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” Why, indeed? The final duet, “Death, where is thy sting?”, gives alto Olivia Payne and tenor Sebastian Maclaine an elegant cameo.
The “Hallelujah” chorus arrives like the celebrity guest everyone has been waiting for, its cheerful introduction setting off an awkward ripple of movement as audience members decide whether to rise to the occasion or remain seated. Either way, it is a moment of undiluted joy – as trumpeters Leanne Sullivan and Richard Fomison add their layer of gold to the music I find myself grinning. Then, as “Part the Third” plays out, with its mystical revelations fastidiously outlined by this crack team of experts, I find myself thinking about the work.
Handel’s Messiah is most emphatically not an opera. There are no named characters, no costumes, definitely no dancing and, unlike Bach’s Passions, which are dramatised accounts of the life of Jesus drawn from the New Testament Gospels, most of the text for Messiah is derived from the Old Testament, using verses from Isaiah and other prophets to evoke the inhumanity of trial and crucifixion. Storytelling on a human scale gives way to contemplating the infinite.
The strange, elliptical words, compiled by Handel’s sometime collaborator and oddball scholar Charles Jennens, often go unremarked, partly because the work is so familiar to those with European heritage, and partly because in most traditional performances, with a large chorus and orchestra, you don’t hear the text in the great welter of sound. But here, with the transparent sound of 12 individual singers and the gentle textures of baroque strings, I am left with a profound sense of mystery. It’s a remarkable new version indeed.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 6, 2025 as "Holy mystery".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
