Handel: Israel in Ägypten

During his lifetime, Handel revisited his score of Israel in Egypt many times to create a more ‘audience friendly work’, meaning that by the early nineteenth century there were several versions available, often vastly truncated to satisfy the musical appetites of the day.

Latest release on VIVAT brings Mendelssohn’s astonishing reconstruction of Handel’s great oratorio Israel in Egypt. Mendelssohn’s 1833 Düsseldorf performance has been painstakingly reconstructed from fragments and sources across Europe: the large and colourful orchestra, playing nineteenth-century instruments, produces vivid new sonorities, and the double choir sings magnificently. Listeners familiar with Handel’s 1739 version will also find new numbers, significant changes to the order of movements and very different orchestrations.

Classical Discovery offers an ideal package, providing an overview of classical music and its history in an entertaining and easy-to-understand form. In a lavishly presented cloth-bound book, accompanied by 12 CDs with over 900 minutes of playing time, Classical Discovery tells the story of the classics in word, music, and images from its earliest days until modern times. With Classical Discovery, anyone can gain entry to the world of classical music, whether for the first time or to gain new insights and perspectives.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s oratorio Elias Op. 70 was premiered in 1846 at the Birmingham Festival. It depicts the life of the prophet Elijah, taken from the books 1 and 2 Kings of the Old Testament. While it was composed in the spirit of Mendelssohn’s Baroque predecessors Bach and Handel, its lyricism and use of orchestral and choral color clearly reflects Mendelssohn’s own genius as an early Romantic composer. Paulus Op. 36, written a decade earlier, was a popular work during Mendelssohn’s lifetime, but failed to maintain its stature in comparison to his other oratorios and the oratorios of Handel and Bach.