Every year at this time certain seasonal favorites may be indicated for your listening pleasure. Recordings of these favorites are a-dime-a-dozen and often don’t do justice to the composer’s work. So here’s a little guidance to make the most of your holiday listening.

Messiah (HWV 56) - George Frideric Handel

Messiah was written in 1741 and first performed in Dublin in 1742 when Handel was 57. At the time Handel was considering a move back to his German homeland until friend and literary scholar Charles Jennens convinced him otherwise. Jennens had recently arranged a compliation of biblical scriptures that he proposed Handel use in an oratorio - Handel accepted and remained in London to work on the project. He is said to have completed the work in record time - twenty four days, while in his home at 25 Brook Street.

The scriptures arranged by Jennens encompass profound spiritual themes central to Christianity. Divided into three parts, the standard format for an oratorio, Messiah follows the life of Christ from the prophesy of his birth to the crucifiction and resurection. The words and music take us through the divine and spiritual battle of good vs. evil culminating in the triumph of virtue over sin and the redemption of humankind. With the resurection of Christ at its climax, Messiah had been a traditional Easter performance, but has since become associated more closely with Christmas.

Messiah was not written and cast in stone, in fact the work has evolved significantly over time, such that there is no truely definitive version that accurately reflects the original. Revisions and specific arragements began appearing even before Handel passed in 1759. The most famous arrangement came about in 1788 when Mozart was commissioned by Baron van Swieten to provide more modern versions of Handel’s oratorios including Messiah. Mozart made significant changes to the orchestration, phrasing, and instrumentation that are still performed to this day.

The Messiah recordings are numerous to say the least, and because of its evolution over the centuries there are many different versions. Recordings range from traditional authentic performances to more modern re-orchestrations that add more colour and possibly entertainment value (or some might say over exaggerated). Also the recordings of choral selections should not be forgotten, as many enjoy hearing the more popular exerpts, without sitting through the entire oratorio. Here are some recommended recordings of performances in these areas:

Authentic / Traditional

Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood Conductor
This is a truely traditional recording perhaps even scholarly, and is based on period instruments. If you are looking for an academic version and period sound this is your best bet. Thanks Marc.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with Sir Georg Solti, Conductor and Kiri Te Kawana, Soprano
This is a complete, and traditional recording performed in 1985. The work is would be most suitable for those interested in an authentic recording. Kiri Te Kawana provides a mostly supurb performance.

Transitional

London Symphony Orchestra, with Sir Colin Davis, Conductor
This performance was recorded in 1966, and could be considered a compromise between the traditional and modern performances with a bias to the traditional. It is a complete recording save for a single section of “He was despised”, and is recorded on modern instruments.

Modern

The Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields with Sir Neville Marriner, Conductor
This is a complete but modern recording performed with modern instruments. It is a very exciting perfomance with a noticeably upbeat tempo and a pleasing rhythmic flow all done very tastefully and not taken over the top.

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An article over at the Moscow Times discusses the fascinating topic of the creative foundations of some of Russia’s most notable composers and cultural icons. Caryl Emerson reports on a book entitled Five Operas and a Symphony by Boris Gasparov that explores Russian musical culture through “culturology - a speculative human science anchored firmly in empirical data and unburdened by strident politics”. Using this discipline as its base the book attempts to correlate common themes of Russian culture to unmask a hidden code of creativity.

The book includes analysis of Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony (1934).

Read more about the Discipline of Culturology

[From: The Moscow Times]

I can’t say that I follow the Grammy Awards very closely but it is worth mentioning that The Emerson String Quartet has been nominated (again) for Best Classical Album and Best Chamber Music Performance. This time they are on the list for their epic recording “Mendelssohn: The Complete String Quartets” (Sämtliche Streichquartette) on Deutsche Grammophon.

This is a brilliant recording that shouldn’t be missed, and would be an exciting buy for the listener not yet familiar with Mendelssohn’s lesser known string quartets. Incidentally ESQ also includes a recording of the Octet in E flat, Op.20 recorded in two seperate sessions

If they win, it will be the seventh Grammy for the group.

It all started in a small, pear-shaped metal box labeled “Beethoven” containing thirteen skull fragments. Two of these fragments underwent forensic testing at the University of Munster, the results of which were compared to the DNA from a lock (the “Guevara” lock) of Beethoven’s Hair to confirm Beethoven as the owner.

The owner of the box - Paul Kaufman - who inherited the remains through a relative, has the fragments on long term loan to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies. Apparently the Seligmann-Kaufman’s family obtained the skull fragments in 1863 when Beethoven’s remains were exhumed to preserve them in a new casket.

Today researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory, using the fragments described above definitively confirmed the presence of significant levels of lead - more than 100 times higher than nominal levels for Beethoven’s time (Graphs of Results).

“The testing indicated large amounts of lead in the Beethoven bone sample, compared to the control,â€? said Bill Walsh, chief scientist at the Pfeiffer Treatment Center in Warrenville, Ill., and director of the Beethoven Research Project. “There’s no doubt in my mind . . . he was a victim of lead poisoning”

The testing was performed with the Advanced Photon Source X-Ray Scanner at the Argonne Lab using a process known as “X-Ray Fluorescence Intensity”.

Beethoven is well known to have suffered through terrible health problems throughout his life, problems he often wrote about saying in a letter dated 1801:

… but that jealous demon, my bad health, has thrown a wicked hindrance my way: for three years my hearing has been getting ever weaker, and this is supposed to be on account of my abdomen [Unterleib], which, as you know, was already miserable then [der schon damals wie Du weist elend war], but here it has become worse because I was constantly burdened with diarrhea [Durchfall]…¹

While the source of the lead is not known, this discovery now definitively confirms the source of the health problems that plagued Beethoven throughout his life to be lead, and further puts to rest any speculation that he did not contract or suffer from syphilis (due to undetectable mercury levels). It is unlikely that lead was the cause of Beethoven’s deafness.

Note that this theory is not new as similar results were obtained from tests done on two of Beethoven’s hairs in 2000 (CBC News Story) but were not conclusive. During the tests the hairs were destroyed, and the owner was not willing to perform further testing until recently when less invasive tests became available.

[From: The Washington Post]

Interview and video available at PBS

¹www2.sjsu.edu/depts/beethoven/skull/abdominal.html

Straight from St. Thomas Square Leipzig, a great calendar full of J.S. Bach multimedia for each day of December leading up to the 25th.

Thanks to the Beeb for helping us to get into the Christmas spirit.

See it here: Bach Advent Calendar

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote the “Grosse Fuge” in Bâ™­ Opus 134 in 1825-1826 less than two years before his death (March 26, 1827). The work is actually an arrangement of the Große Fuge Op. 133 string quartet finale for piano with four hands.

The manuscript last surfaced in 1890 at auction in Berlin where it is believed to have begun its journey to the United States and subsequently to the basement archives of the Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. It was discovered by librarian Heather Carbo who happened upon the score while rearranging a storage area. It is now believed that a Cincinnati industrialist named William Howard Doane purchased the score at the 1890 auction and passed it on to his daughter Margaret Treat Doane who donated it to the seminary in 1950.

The “Grosse Fuge” manuscript is an 80 page work written in brown ink by Beethoven himself - a rampant writing of notes and scribbles with many phrases scratched out and tempestuous markings that seem to follow the ups-and-downs of the music written around them.

A transcript of an interview with the manuscript’s discoverer is available at www.classicalmusicphiladelphia.com/carbo.htm