This album of highlights from George Frederick Handel's Messiah presents the best-known instrumentals, arias, and choruses from this hallowed work on 19 tracks, performed in Baroque period style by the Arnold Schoenberg Choir and Concentus Musicus Wien, led by the redoubtable Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Crisp rhythms, distinctive tone colors, and lean textures are in evidence throughout, and the luster of original instruments makes these selections feel light and transparent, as opposed to the thicker textures and flatter ...
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This album of highlights from George Frederick Handel's Messiah presents the best-known instrumentals, arias, and choruses from this hallowed work on 19 tracks, performed in Baroque period style by the Arnold Schoenberg Choir and Concentus Musicus Wien, led by the redoubtable Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Crisp rhythms, distinctive tone colors, and lean textures are in evidence throughout, and the luster of original instruments makes these selections feel light and transparent, as opposed to the thicker textures and flatter sonorities of older, traditional (i.e., post-Romantic) readings. Harnoncourt, of course, was from the outset one of the leaders of the movement for authentic period practices and key in sweeping the cobwebs off the great masterpieces of early music; this 2004 recording of Messiah is quite far removed from the stodgy, overly reverent readings that persisted well into the late twentieth century, but are becoming scarce in the early twenty first. Where one may question this performance is...
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