Handel Messiah Mp3

Raymond Leppard was among the most important and prolific British conductors of the 20th century, identified for many years by his work with the English Chamber Orchestra. He was a scholar and a noted film music composer, and both as scholar and performer, he played a major role in the revival of Baroque music worldwide. Raymond John Leppard was born in London on August 11, 1927, but grew up in Bath. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied viola and harpsichord, the latter an unusual course at the time. While at Trinity College, he conducted choirs and the Cambridge Philharmonic Society, and after graduating in 1952, he gravitated toward conducting.

Most music lovers have encountered George Frederick Handel through holiday-time renditions of the Messiah's "Hallelujah" chorus. And many of them know and love that oratorio on Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as well as a few other greatest hits like the orchestral Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, and perhaps Judas Maccabeus or one of the other English oratorios. Yet his operas, for which he was widely known in his own time, are the province mainly of specialists in Baroque music, and the events of his life, even though they reflected some of the most important musical issues of the day, have never become as familiar as the careers of Bach or Mozart. Perhaps the single word that best describes his life and music is "cosmopolitan".

“A lifetime of performing Messiah has brought me enough courage to record this singularly famous piece of music. With the finest musicians and soloists on the planet surrounding me, I’m finally ready to lay down my personal interpretation for posterity.”

The Dallas Bach Society joined with their director and prominent harpsichordist James Richman provide a masterful debut recording with Onyx Classics, Handel’s ‘Messiah’, a new edition provided by Malcolm Bruno based on the original 1741 score. Handel had composed the work at an astounishing pace, spending less than a month in the summer of 1741. At its premiere in Dublin, over 700 patrons overcrowded the Musick hall, with the ladies had been requested to dress ‘without hoops’ in help make room. The Messiah was an instant hit and is established as Handel’s greatest works.

German conductor Otto Klemperer attended the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt-am-Main, studied violin and piano at the Klindworth-Scharwenka and Stern Conservatories in Berlin, and composition with the German composer Pfitzner. He made his début in Berlin in 1905, where he conducted fifty performances of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, not a work that would now be identified with Klemperer's serious and profoundly personal approach to music. Shortly afterwards, he visited Gustav Mahler in Vienna and impressed the composer by playing a scherzo from a Mahler symphony by memory at the piano. With Mahler's personal recommendation, Klemperer was appointed choirmaster and conductor at the German Opera in Prague.

Georg Friedrich Händels Messiah wurde am 13. April 1742 erstmals in Dublin aufgeführt und danach mehrmals umgearbeitet. Doch es existiert eine frühere Fassung von 1741, die auf den beiden autographen Partituren des Komponisten basiert. Der Musikwissenschaftler Malcolm Bruno hat diese Urfassung rekonstruiert. So agiert hier nun ein eigenständiger Holzbläsersatz aus zwei Oboen und Fagotten, und auch bei den Arien kann man Neues entdecken. Bruno ist von der Ersteinspielung des „Ur-Messiah“ begeistert und hoff t, „dass der Zuhörer die Erfahrung macht, den Messiah so zu hören, als ob er zum allerersten Mal aufgeführt würde, als ob die Tinte von Händels Manuskript noch feucht wäre.“ George Frideric Handel‘s Messiah was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742 and subsequently reworked several times. However, an earlier version from 1741 exists, based on the composer‘s two autograph scores. The musicologist Malcolm Bruno has reconstructed this original version and published it with Breitkopf & Härtel. In this version, an independent woodwind section consisting of two oboes and bassoons can be heard, and there are also new discoveries to be made in the arias. Bruno is enthusiastic about the first recording of the „Ur-Messiah“ and hopes „that the listener has the experience of hearing the Messiah as if for a fi rst time, as if the ink of Handel’s manuscript were still wet“.

Not surprisingly, John Rutter's is essentially a traditional performance, but with lively tempi and no lack of expressive feeling; and it is very well recorded indeed…Altogether a fine set which will give much pleasure.

The Messiah"" by George Frederic Handel counts among the most popular and formative oratorios. Starting in 1750, it has for decades been annually performed as conclusion to the oratorio season in London, oftentimes under the baton of Handel himself. The ""Messiah"" is, essentially, nothing other than a biography of Jesus told in metaphors and described with the immense dramatic power, passion and religious emphasis of Handel.

This is the Messiah that started it all–the first period instrument performance recorded with a choir of men and boys. It introduced music lovers the world over to Christopher Hogwood, Emma Kirkby, and a whole host of performers who have since become ubiquitous as the "English Early Music Mafia," appearing as they do under zillions of different ensemble names on a variety of labels. Hogwood's performance still holds its own, however, as one of the finest and freshest available. A first-rate effort. –David Hurwitz