Tag: Saul

Review of Handel’s Saul, May 2017

A Resounding Musical Success!

On May 13th in St. Edmund’s Church, Shipston-on-Stour, under the thorough baton of dedicated musical director Richard Emms, his Shipston choir, the Stour Singers, and the well-established, youthful chamber orchestra, Midlands-based Queen’s Park Sinfonia, performed Handel’s Oratorio Saul to the delight of all who came.  Music comes in all shapes and sizes from Pop and Rock to high Baroque, something to suit all tastes.  It can thrill, chill, move and elate us.  This programme was elating.

And the choir and audience were blessed with five extraordinary and highly professional vocal soloists!  Handel wanted to tell a famous dramatic story and it could surely not have been better told than by these five singers.  Australian soprano, Anita Watson, winner of so many international competitions, sang Saul’s daughter and lover of David, Michal, in her rich and beautiful voice, which rang out with warmth and distinction.  Tim Morgan, a young countertenor, was technically excellent and sang David with an astonishing range and richness, simply a lovely voice.  Ben Thapa, tenor, sang Jonathan and his dramatically expressive singing was equally exemplified in the other roles he took.  Baritone, Alistair Donaghue, fulfilled the voice of prophesy and other parts with clarity and with a warm and liquid tone that charmed the ear.  The commanding and explicit voice of bass baritone, Darren Jeffery, sang the tormented King Saul and filled it with strength and emotional depth and with great clarity.  What a tremendous and hugely experienced quintet of soloists to put over so much drama with such conviction!

And the choir?  It was outstanding on this occasion, both in its balanced vocal strength and interpretation.  Quick and clear on their entries, the choristers put everything they had at their vocal disposal into this moving feast, from feisty to moments of pure sorrow as in ‘Mourn Israel…‘.  They sounded very confident and appeared to be enjoying singing.

Providing the continuous musical accompaniment to all the vocal performers in Handel’s emotionally wide-ranging score was the Queen’s Park Sinfonia with its lively and dynamically expressive playing, with special praise for the woodwind… and to Rachel Bird, the choir’s accompanist, on keyboard.

This was an evening-out to remember: amazing composer, live musicians, live audience, live music on our rural doorstep.  We live in troubled times, but in such music, telling a tale going back more than three thousand years, we are reminded across centuries of our humanity and that while there’s life, there’s love and hope.  And music surely plays a deep and central role in our lives!

Ina M. Evans

Review by Richard Emms

Handel’s Saul

Handel’s Saul

is surely one of the most moving works in Handel’s whole output. He took great care over it, spending a full 65 days in its composition (compared with the amazing 24 days for Messiah and 27 days for Israel in Egypt.

G F Handel

 

Charles Jennens, had presented Handel with a libretto, perhaps for Saul in 1735. But it was on 26th July 1738 that the 53-year-old Handel actually started work on Saul, the day after hearing there were not enough subscribers for a proposed opera. Oratorios were so much cheaper to stage than operas.

In Saul, as in his next oratorio Israel in Egypt, the chorus plays a major role as the People of Israel. Apparently the public of the time did not particularly like massive choruses, preferring simpler airs; but in the longer term the choruses have proved to provide some of the most powerful and poignant moments in the piece, as in the Envy chorus and the funeral lament.
The public didn’t appreciate the more imaginative orchestra either. They were used to an orchestra of just strings, oboes and continuo; in Saul there were also trumpets, trombones, kettle-drums (borrowed from the Tower of London), flutes at one point and a carillon. This carillon was played with a keyboard, and was in effect forerunner of the celeste. It was, according to Jennens, one of Handel’s maggots.

The King’s Theatre, Haymarket, London

Saul was first performed in January, 1739 at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. It proved to be one of his most popular works, being performed six times on the trot during its first season.

 

Handel’s maggots – obsessions

On 19th September 1738, Jennens wrote to a friend

“Mr.Handel’s head is more full of maggots than ever”

Maggot 1: His newly discovered carillon – “with this Cyclopean instrument he designs to made poor Saul stark mad.”

Maggot 2: A bespoke organ, costing £500, designed so that he could direct the orchestra from it, ‘all the time with his back to the audience!’ (Not considered a bad idea now; but the cost in current money would be about £77,000). Jennens suggested he was ‘overstocked with money’ – a bit rich considering the cost of his own Leicestershire home.

Maggot 3: ‘A Hallelujah he has trumped up at the end of his oratorio since I went into the country’. Handel had refused to set the Hallelujah Jennens had put at the end of the opening scene, and thought Jennens’ ending not sufficiently grand. Fortunately for us Handel carried out precisely Jennens intentions regarding Hallelujahs.

Jennens concludes: “but it grows late and I must defer the rest till I write next, by which time, I doubt not, more new ones will breed in his brain.”

 

Charles Jennens

was born in Gopsall Hall in Leicestershire.

His great-grandfather was one of the great Birmingham ironmasters and lived at Aston Hall. So the family were immensely wealthy and Charles lived accordingly, with a second home in Bloomsbury.

Charles Jennens

He was a man of literary pretensions, bringing out his own edition of some of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which brought him scorn and ridicule from some quarters. But he was a very able amateur librettist, providing the libretti for Messiah and Belshazzar, as well as Saul.

Both Jennens and Handel were difficult men, apt to be high-handed. Handel could fairly massacre a libretto to suit his music; but Jennens would not countenance such treatment of his work (see maggot number 3 )