Handel's Messiah is for very good reason one of the most beautiful and famous works in Western music, and one of the most performed and sung. Gli Angeli Genève plans to perform it every December at the Victoria Hall (even twice this season!) with a wonderful line-up of vocal soloists led by Sandrine Piau. As musicians, we always return with a sense of fascination, wondering how such a succession of hit pieces and a libretto made up of such disparate extracts from the first English translations of the Bible can come together to form such a perfect, intangible whole. It may be tempting to reduce the work to the best-known Hallelujah in history or to a few of the most sung arias and choruses in the world, but it is in the exceptional quality of its structure, in the intelligence with which Jenkins and Handel manage to recount the whole life of Christ in just 140 minutes, and in the resulting synthesis of an entire liturgical year of praise and religious hymns, that the secret of the eternal success of the Oratorio of oratorios, the «King of kings», lies.
Concert introduction :
Saturday, December 2nd - 7:15 pm
Sunday, December 3rd - 4:15 pm