The Bridgehead
Finally: "When the choirs fell silent after a full evening heavy with meaning, the voices died away to the echoes of the eternal. This was real music, the music of the spheres. The audience sat for a moment, and then began to applaud. The standing ovation carried on until the singers and musicians finally began to file out of the church. Hundreds of years after Handel put the story of Israel’s captivity in Egypt to music, the power of the piece has only grown, contrasted as it now is by the tawdry counterfeit pop that passes for “praise and worship” today. In an age of cheap modernity, Handel’s oratorios soar to ever-greater heights." . . .
"When George Frideric Handel’s Israel in Egypt premiered at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket on April 4, 1739, the audience disliked it. They disliked it so much, in fact, that when Handel put his new oratorio—the first of two he would write that consisted entirely of verses from Scripture—into the opera season, it was cancelled for lack of subscribers. Handel began to rework it, importing arias from other pieces of music, and then resurrected his masterpiece in 1756. The back-to-back thundering choruses and vivid imagery of God’s battle with Egypt on behalf of Israel soon made the oratorio one of Handel’s most beloved pieces, second only to the Messiah. “Handel understands effect better than any of us,” Mozart enviously observed. “When he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt.”
"Last weekend, I had the privilege of attending a magnificent performance of Israel in Egypt put on by the University of Toronto Schola Cantorum, the Collegium Musicum, the Choir of the Theatre of Early Music, and the Clarion Choir, directed by Jeanne Lamon and Daniel Taylor and hosted by St. Patrick’s Shrine Church (built in 1881) in downtown Toronto. It was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, the music tearing the audience from the tyranny of the present and at the height of several of the choruses, seeming to break free of time itself. Handel’s soaring music and Scripture’s solemn words arch over time, fusing us with past centuries until the choruses of then and now and in between form a perfect continuum and one can only listen in awe and contemplate the transcendence of true praise." . . .
. . .Finally: "When the choirs fell silent after a full evening heavy with meaning, the voices died away to the echoes of the eternal. This was real music, the music of the spheres. The audience sat for a moment, and then began to applaud. The standing ovation carried on until the singers and musicians finally began to file out of the church. Hundreds of years after Handel put the story of Israel’s captivity in Egypt to music, the power of the piece has only grown, contrasted as it now is by the tawdry counterfeit pop that passes for “praise and worship” today. In an age of cheap modernity, Handel’s oratorios soar to ever-greater heights." . . .
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