Apparently my messiah lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

The last week I’ve responded several times to the question, “What are you up to this weekend?” with “I’ve got a Messiah in Jersey.”  And it wasn’t until yesterday that it occurred to me how amazing and absurd and vaguely  prophetic this phrase is.  For freelance musicians in the U.S., Messiahs in [insert region here] abound, and we utter versions of that sentence “I have a Messiah in Jersey” constantly during the month of December.  I’m only playing one performance this season, but there are musicians who will go from production to production this month, like a Broadway gig.

I’d like to take a moment here to geek out (again) about Handel.  I can’t get enough.  I’ve been absorbing harmonic sequences through a catheter this last month while writing a string quartet (that plays with the legibility and rhetoric of these progressions), so I’m ubersensitive to any chains of secondary dominants.  This kind of makes playing the Messiah a totally trippy and extremely beautiful experience.

One of my strongest musical memories is of Jimmy Taylor singing “Comfort Ye” in Christ Church New Haven.  I was working as an alto in the choir then, in the legendary days of Rob Lehman, and I remember so clearly that floated cadenza in the beginning of the aria, unaccompanied, spinning out into the candlelit ether.

Here he is (James Taylor, tenor) in a recording with Rilling at the Oregon Bach Festival:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Both comments and pings are currently closed.